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!

Day 17: Bread basics

Hello fork musketeers!

Monday was a rather busy day, so we started bread today.

Don't mind the weird personalized baguette.

Bread basics

If you've never made bread before, here's something you may not have thought of; bread is alive. At least when you're making it, not when it's finished baking. This is because the process of making bread uses yeast, a bacteria also used in wines for fermentation.

What is fermentation?

Fermentation is essentially the process of bacteria, such as yeast, consuming sugar and farting out carbon dioxide (CO2) and alcohol.  If you google some images of rising bread, you might see breads that have bubbles in them and, if you've made bread, it will have a faint alcohol smell. This is the exact same process used for making wines and beers, although it's been tweaked for making breads.

Yeast is considered a leavener; just like baking soda and baking powder helps doughs rise, yeast does the same thing. The advantage yeast has for breads is it gives your product a more complex flavour during the fermentation process. When you bake your bread, the yeast continues to produce alcohol and CO2 until it eventually dies due to the high heat. The remaining gas heats up and expands; this is what causes your bread to rise.

A basic bread recipe is flour; liquids (water and/or milk) and yeast. For home bakers, you can buy, I think, two different versions of yeast at your grocery store: dry active yeast and instant dry yeast. They're both very similar but dry active yeast needs to be dissolved in warm water whereas instant yeast can be added directly to the dough. At the shop we used a different version of yeast. I'm not sure what it was called, but it was in a solid form and kind of chunky. But that's a topic for another time.

When you see a baker's recipe for simple bread, you might see something like this:

1. Flour 100%
2. Water 70%
3. Salt 1.5%
4. yeast 1.5%

For the uninitiated, it might look weird and confusing as hell. Aren't percentages supposed to add up to 100? This thing is 173%! What's going on?!!

It turns out the percentages are based on how much flour you're using. So if you wanted to use 500g of flour, your amounts would look like this:

1. 500g flour (100%)
2. 350g water (70% of 500)
3. 7.5g salt and yeast (1.5% of 500)

The thing about making bread is it not always the same all-year around. Humid weather will mean less liquids; colder weather will mean more yeast, etc. Making bread is more of an art than following the recipe blindly.

If you're using an electric mixer, the temperature of your ingredients will play a more important role in your breadmaking endeavours. While some recipes will recommend to reserve some flour to adjust the dough, adding flour will change the ratio of of your ingredients. So Chef C told us to use water to adjust the consistency instead.

When you're making bread, it's important to know the overall temperature of your dough when you're done. For regular homebakers it may not be a concern, but if you want consistent results you should be more aware of the temperature of your dough.

In general, you aim for a certain temperature - Chef C gave us 69˚C to shoot for - and consider the temperature of: your flour; your environment; your pre-ferment (if using) and use your water to adjust the difference. So if your environment is 21˚C and everything's room temperature, it should be 21+21+21 (pre-ferment) = 63. So the difference is 6˚C. Your water should be pretty cold. I don't think I quite understand this principle very well, but I did find a more technical link that talks about this in more detail. I'll have to ask more questions tomorrow.

Making your dough

You're either making your dough by hand or using a mixer. Kneading by hand is simpler and it will require more physical effort; however it's practically impossible to overknead by hand. If you have electronic assistance, it's obviously easier on you but overkneading becomes a possibility.

We made our dough with the mixer, so lucky us. Whether you're doing it by hand or with the mixer, you want to make sure you do a few things.

1. Don't put the salt and/or sugar on top of the yeast. Remember; salt and sugar are antiseptics and yeast is a bacteria. You and your yeast will be the losers if your yeast and salt/sugar touch each other.
2. Mix slowly to incorporate all your ingredients/moisten the flour.
3. When everything's together, start kneading or put the mixer on a slightly higher speed.

There are various ways to check when your dough is ready; it should look smooth and supple when you roll it into a ball. I've tried the window pane test in my own bread adventures with varying degrees of success.

Eehhhh not so sure here

Oh ok it looks fine. Cool!

Then you have to let it proof. All this means is letting the yeast do some work. Just remember that the dough can stick to the sides, so feel free to put a bit of oil and a towel on top.

When it's done proofing, I like to do the finger test. All you need to do is flour your finger and poke a hole straight down the middle of your dough. Don't be shy now.

Poke!

The hole your finger create should stay. If it shrinks into a small dimple quickly, it means your dough hasn't risen enough. Just put the towel back on and continue your day. If not, you're ready to proceed to punch down. This removes excess gas.

In this case, we divided the dough into pain de campagne and baguette. You want to form it into a ball by gently tucking the edges into the centre. Flip it over and drag the ball across your floured surface to even out the bottom.

After this, just let your dough rest for a few minutes before shaping. In the case of the baguette, you need to gently roll the ball into a log. Just roll it from the centre to the outside and repeat until it's the length you want. Try to make it as even as possible, otherwise it'll turn out like mine! When you're done, let the dough rise again until doubled in volume.

Baking pain de campagne and baguette

For pain de campagne and baguette, you need a lot of humidity inside your oven. Additional humidity will give you a really nice crust as well as help the bread expand. You don't want water though; you want ice cubes. Due to the high oven temperature, the ice cubes sublimates - going from a solid (ice) to a gas (steam) almost immediately. Throwing water in there will just boil over.

For the pretty details on top, you want to put your dough on your tray and put a bit of flour on top. Then slice away with your knife. I didn't put flour on my pain de campagne when I cut it (whoops!). This is why it looks kinda funny.

Alternatively, you can put a tray in your pre-heated oven to get it really hot. This would mean you have a tray where you do your details and then slide your products onto the hot tray. This is how we did it.

That's it for today. In addition to these basic breads, we also made our doughs for croissants and brioche; which we will make tomorrow. So stay tuned!

Recipe tips: Opéra

Hello fork musketeers!

Today we'll be taking a look at the elegant Opéra.

(No I didn't forget to pipe the name on it. I ran out of time and the chocolate was already hard and put away, so I simply omitted it)

So let's look at the anatomy of an Opéra cake. It consists of three or four different parts: joconde sponge cake; chocolate ganache; coffee flavoured buttercream and pâte à glacer (frosting paste). The last is optional and you could totally use chocolate ganache instead.

Your opéra components

So joconde cake is exactly like making lady fingers, except you're incorporating the almond powder with the eggs. When that's whipped, reserve and make meringue and incorporate the meringue into the batter. You'll want to incorporate the meringue as best you can in as little turns as possible. Chunks of meringue will make your joconde rise unevenly.

At school we lined small trays with parchment paper and poured the batter into the trays. Parchment paper will really help with the assembly, so I highly recommend you use it. Once you bake it, take it off the tray (thanks to the parchment paper) and put a towel on top. The steam will help make the sponge more moist and soft.

In the mean time, you can make your ganache and buttercream. Let's take a closer look at the ganache.

Ganache troubleshooting tips

Ganache. So simple and delicious, but it's not the most beautiful food to watch while it's being made. In fact, if you just decide to jump into making ganache without knowing, you would think you screwed it up. Don't fret; just keep mixing and it will come togther.

That being said, sometimes your ganache will "break" even if you've done all the right things.

Notice the clumpy bits.

It's really discouraging when you've made ganache before and, because the stars and the moon aligned on the night of a red moon in summer, your ganache breaks. It totally sucks... but it can be fixed! Yay!

The reason why a ganache breaks is usually because there's not enough fat; either from the lack of fat in the chocolate and/or the lack of fat in the cream/milk. So check this out: all you need is some cold cream and...

Top part is the broken ganache.
The bottom is the ganache with added cream.

... look at the world of difference! You show that ganache who's boss!

Assembling your Opéra

Opéra cake is a layered cake. So you have to cut your joconde into three, more-or-less, similar pieces and your layers need to go like this:

Going from the bottom to the top:

1. Joconde (+coffee syrup)
2. Coffee buttercream
3. Joconde (+coffee syrup)
4. Ganache
5. Joconde (+coffee syrup)
6. Coffee buttercream
7. Frosting paste or chocolate ganache.

The slight exception is the bottom. If you want, you can apply some frosting paste on the crust-side of your joconde before flipping it over. I know on my very first Opéra cake I didn't put anything; so it's up to you.

Protip: you should assemble this cake crust side down. In other words, you're going to be flipping your joconde so the golden and delicious part is always facing the ground. You should be using the parchment paper as a way to grab your slightly tacky joconde and peeling off the parchment paper before you put the syrup. You assemble it this way so the coffee syrup can penetrate the joconde more easily.

When you're applying the syrup, be very liberal with it. You don't have to be super liberal with the layer on the very bottom but for the middle and the top layer you shouldn't be afraid to use your syrup. You know you're done when the coffee syrup is not immediately absorbed into the sponge or you can cut small slits to see if the joconde is brown from the syrup.

As a rule of thumb, opéra is a very, very flat cake. Chef said the cake shouldn't be more than 2-3cm or 0.75"- 1 1/8"~ high, so be careful not to make your joconde too thick. When you're done, pop your opéra in the fridge and let the buttercream firm up before you apply the top layer.

Protip: Take special care to put a bit more buttercream/ganache in the corners and edges of the cake. Those areas tend to be overlooked. Also, make sure the top buttercream layer is very smooth; any obvious bumps and/or imperfections are going to show through the chocolate layer on top. Don't fret if you have minor spatula streaking though.

The trickiest part about this is when you need to put the frosting paste on top. You can add a bit of vegetable oil to make it more runny. If you're using chocolate ganache, I popped mine in the microwave to warm up so it was runny. This step has to be done quickly and with the least amount of fiddling as possible; the more you touch it, the uglier your top will be. As you pour, don't be afraid if it dripples off the side. You're going to be cutting the edges anyway!

Protip: When you put your ganache/frosting paste on top, make sure your cake isn't super cold. It'll cause your ganache/paste to set much more quickly and make it harder to get a smooth finish.

The next step is cutting your opéra. 

Chef's Opéra being used as a demo.

Whether you used chocolate ganache or frosting paste, you need a hot knife to effectively cut it. You want the hot knife to melt the chocolate on top, then when the knife melts through the chocolate, you may apply pressure to cut the rest of it. This is more crucial if you used frosting paste; when it sets it becomes hard so it will snap if you apply too much pressure. And that will make us both upset. So! Remember to use a hot knife to melt the chocolate and be patient.

Dat cutting action.

What you do with the extra bits is up to you.

In general, Opéra is an extremely rich dessert that is best eaten in small quantities. The exact proportion of the square/rectangle is up to you. If you're more into numbers, Chef told me the general serving size is between 80-120grams.

The width on the right pieces bothered me so much that
I ended up cutting them into squares. I have no regrets.

If you notice on the bottom row, 5th piece to the left:

... That piece cracked because I didn't let the knife melt the chocolate and that area was a little thin. So when you're cutting you must have a super hot knife and patience, patience, patience! Plus wipe your knife between each cut.

Protip: I found continuously diving your cake into halves (half/quarter/eighth etc) will help you get more even pieces.

Just for fun, let's do a bit of comparing:

My very first opera cake.

Opéra I made at school

Which do you think is better?