Day 18: Croissants (feat. Brioche)

Hello fork musketeers!

Today we made croissants and brioche.

... However, I'll focus more on croissants for now. Don't worry; brioche will come another day. :)

What's a croissant?

A croissant is considered a viennoiserie. A viennoiserie is a hybrid between a bread and puff pastry or an enriched, richer pastry. In this case, croissant is a mix of puff pastry and bread. If you remember puff pastry, this is a dough that has butter laminated between thin sheets of dough. This lamination is important because the butter is boiling in the oven and releasing steam. The steam pushes against the dough and forces it to rise. However, instead of relying solely on steam, croissant uses yeast instead. Yeast is preferred over baking soda or powder because it will add additional flavour.

Croissant basics

Croissant starts off just like puff pastry. You need to make a basic dough (sans butter) except you're adding yeast to it. You also need to make a butter square. When both are thoroughly chilled, the butter will be incorporated into the dough.... just like puff pastry.

Now here's where it's a little different. Puff pastry needs to be turned 6 times since it uses steam to rise. However, we don't need to create so many layers because there's yeast in there. Croissant only need to be turned a total of three (3) times. We did two turns yesterday then refrigerated it overnight.

Notice how it looks a bit poofy.
This is because it rose overnight.

For the last turn, if you let it rise, you need to punch down (literally... just punch it down) to remove the excess gas. When you've done your last turn, you'll need to roll out a fairly equal rectangle; the width of your dough will determine the overall size. Chef didn't give us an exact number, though I've seen a few croissant recipes suggest 20~cm or 9".

Anyway, roll it out to 20cm by however long you can get it. The thickness should be between 0.5cm and 1cm thick. Then you need to start cutting your dough into isosceles triangles. Now take your triangles and gently stretch them (not too much now!) and you can begin rolling. There's a minor technique to rolling your croissants.

When you're rolling your croissant, you don't roll it completely straight. This is how croissants are commercially rolled. Instead, you went to angle your strokes outwards; this curls the edge of the croissant and gives it a hand-made feel. When your croissants are fully rolled, you should have seven "tiers" in your croissant.

If you prefer to see it, here's a video of Chef showing us.

Don't worry if your triangle isn't stretched evenly or looks kinda lopsided. You can compensate during the rolling process to make the croissant look more even. Remember to be quick about this; you have butter and you don't want your dough to rise while you're doing this.

If you want to curl your croissants you must cut a small slit at middle of the base of your triangle. This additional mouvement allows you to curl them.

When you're done, you can either leave them straight (as we did) or you can curl the ends together. Whatever method you choose, make sure the tip of the triangle is underneath the croissant. Put some egg wash on your croissants and let them proof.

Protip: When you're brushing egg wash, always brush downwards. This ensures that egg wash doesn't seep into your folds which will prevent your croissant from puffing up. Also, make sure you don't get too much on the bottom. It'll burn during the baking process.

So here's the tricky part. How do you know when they're done proofing? It's not like you can do the finger trick. It can also be hard to know if they've truly doubled in size by eye alone and, depending on the environment, it may take more or less amount of time the recipe calls for.

What you can do is gently poke your croissant on the front or the back. You're looking for a specific texture; incredible softness. Seriously, when it was done proofing it felt so incredibly soft and plush and all I thought was, "holy shit". No joke. Until I can find a better way to test proofness, I'm going to go with my "holy shit" plush gauge.

Protip: If your kitchen is on the cold side, you can leave your doughs to proof in your off oven with the pilot light on. My old oven's pilot light was wonky but I've heard some degrees of success. Try it out and see if it works for you.

Anyway, do another egg wash before you pop those babies in the oven. You can watch them rise if you want; if this is your first yeast recipe, watching breads rise can be really amazing. They should be slightly dark brown and glorious looking before you take them out. Ours took about 20ish minutes but all ovens and croissants are different so keep an eye on it.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Tomorrow we'll be making bagels. I'm really excited to try this out, especially since my favourite bagel place closed a year ago. Don't feel shy about leaving a comment below and stay tuned!