Week Eight: Croissants

(This recipe came from “Bake Wise” by Shirley O. Corriher. This is a really long and picture-heavy post, so I’ve broken it up. There is a “more” jump at the bottom of the post.)

Since I made the decision to make croissants about two weeks ago, I’ve been terrified of today. The directions for this recipe take up two and a half pages in the cook book, and it was going to be an all-day affair. But I wanted to stick with my guns and make baked goods that proved to be a bit of a challenge. Croissants were definitely a challenge.

The croissants started last night when I mixed up the dough. It was then refrigerated overnight, while I tried not to think about it.

This morning, I got up at 9 a.m. (which is insanely early for me on a day off from work), and got to work. The first step was clearing off my counter and putting my mom’s “noodle board” on it:

The noodle board is basically a chunk of Formica-covered wooden counter top that used to be in someone’s kitchen, cut down to a manageable size and with the ends rounded off. My mother and grandmother use their noodle boards mostly for making…wait for it…homemade noodles. Although it comes in handy for rolling out pie dough as well.

In doing research for these croissants, I learned that I technically should have a pastry marble for this job. Marble keeps colder than most other materials, and it keeps the immense amount of butter in these croissants from melting on contact. But pastry marbles cost at least $160, so I passed on that and went for the noodle board instead. I think it did a fine job.

The next step was cutting three sticks of butter into long thin strips, which were then rolled in butter:

This sticks were then mangled and mushed and rolled and beaten into a roughly six inch by six inch butter block:

The dough was then retrieved from the refrigerator and the noodle board was oiled to keep the dough from sticking. I rolled the dough out to a roughly 12 inch by 12 inch square:

The butter block was then placed on the dough, which was pulled up and over, encasing the butter:

The dough was then rolled out to a 10 inch by 18 inch rectangle. The bottom third was folded up and the top third was folded down, like a business letter:

Then I wrapped the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerated it for one hour. This process was repeated SIX TIMES (yup, that’s six hours of refrigeration each time). After the final roll and refrigeration, it was time to prep the dough for the cuts.

The dough was rolled out to a roughly 18 inch by 20 inch rectangle. No amount of coaxing from my rolling pin could get that dough into a rectangle shape. The best I could do was sort of an oval, but at least it was the right size:

The dough was cut once right down the middle, and then I placed small notches at the top and bottom of the dough in the exact middle, and then in the top and bottom of the dough in the middle of those two new pieces, resulting in six notches total:

I then made criss-crossing cuts to result in fourteen large triangles and four smaller ones:

If I’d been able to roll out a perfect rectangle, those end pieces would have been triangles rather than weird blobby shapes. Once the triangles were cut, it was time to start rolling. A small cut was made in the short end of each triangle and the ends were tugged a little to stretch the dough. I then rolled each triangle up toward the point:

(They’re so cute!)

The triangles were then placed on two baking sheets (one with cooking oil-sprayed parchment paper, the other with My Precious), and brushed with an egg wash:

And then they went in the oven. I set the oven to 400 degrees and put my pizza stone on the bottom rack. The baking sheet went directly on the stone and the croissants baked for twelve minutes. At that point, the heat was lowered to 350 and they baked for another twelve minutes. And I stood by with my fingers crossed. 24 minutes passed and I pulled them out of the oven:

Oh man! Croissant explosion! There are a couple of okay-looking croissants in there, but for the most part, this first batch resulted in some funky croissant shapes. They smelled okay though. And they tasted grrrreat. My favorite misshapen croissant was this one, which sort of looks like a fist:

The insides looked pretty good, too. Nice and flaky:

The second batch definitely turned out better. There were even some fairly perfect looking croissants in there:

I ended up with roughly 18 croissants, even though two of those were little more than marble-sized balls of dough. Eleven of them turned out good, with three or four perfect specimens. I threw out one small croissant that got a little burnt on the bottom. Six of them were what I like to call “WTF Croissants”, as that is what I shouted at them when they came out of the oven.

This project was so much work. Even this blog post took a lot of time! My sister-in-law remarked that making the croissants took the same amount of time that it would take to fly to Paris. But it was a heck of a lot cheaper.

I don’t know if I’ll be making these again any time soon, but it was actually kind of fun to see them turn out. And I’m glad that some of them were misshapen, because if they had all turned out beautiful and perfect like that last photo, I would have been scared of the power I suddenly discovered.

Tune in next week when I’ll be experimenting with something I plan to call “Twinkle Twinkle Cupcakes”.