This is our second go at making Croissants, the first was in June 1 using the recipe in The Vegan Boulangerie (which I am embarrassed to realize I never posted about.) One of our issues with the results of that experiment was that the pastry ended up being very dense, and not fluffy at all. Allyson, Lila and I discussed trying the recipe again, using the yeasted pastry dough in the same cookbook - then this challenge came up. The recipe provided us was a yeast based pastry, and with a few substitutions (Earth Balance for butter, soy milk for milk and the egg-wash), we were on our way.
Our biggest challenge this month was scheduling - the recipe calls for many periods of different length to let the dough rise. We ended up deciding that I would start the dough on Friday night, and take it to the first "or overnight" resting period, and that we'd pick back up on Saturday morning.
Making the dough was relatively simple, and the biggest concern was getting my counter top clean enough to knead and roll the dough on, as I do not have a cutting board large enough. Once the dough was made, and briefly kneaded, I left it to rise. One variable in the dough is that though the recipe called for a 3 hour rise (or tripled in size), I was out of the house, and did not return to complete the next step for 5 hours. Other than that, we followed the recipe pretty much exactly.
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| Letting the yeast mixture proof. |
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| Salt and sugar into tepid soy milk. |
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| Yeast mixture and milk mixture added to the flour. |
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| I floured my counter top as a workspace. |
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| Pastry dough. |
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| Kneaded dough before rising... | ... and five hours later. |
One thing we noticed on our first croissant making attempt was that we continually had stop rolling and folding the dough to put it in the fridge to chill. Our task was aided this time by a hollow rolling pin my mom found for me - filled with ice and water, our rolling pin was chilled and help keep the dough cold as we worked with it.
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| Nifty hollow rolling pin - fill with ice and water to keep dough cool. |
We ran into a few snags, where the dough tore, or stuck to the pin or the counter, and once or twice the butter that was folded in broke through, but we had better luck with the overall consistency of this dough.
One thing we learned following this recipe, that was unclear from our first attempt, was the rotation of the dough between folding and rolling steps. Not worrying about getting the length needed from the dough by rolling it the same direction each time helped a lot. We still had a problem with elasticity of the dough on the last step, and when we cut our rectangles into squares, then triangles, we found our squares contracted, and were never quite square. This resulted in oddly shaped triangles that we subsequently rolled to make the croissants.
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| The recipe calls for a lot of folding of the dough. |
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| Fattened stick of butter laid out on the dough. |
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| Rolling the dough and butter mix. |
An hour to rise in shape, and then 13 minutes to bake, and my house smelled delicious.
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| Croissants! | Allowed to rise for 1 hour before baking. |
The croissants were flaky and fluffy, though a few still had a dense center, it was no where near as bad as our first attempt with the pastry. My husband, faithful taste-tester noted that they were a little bitter/ salt. I realized the original recipe called for ½ cup unsalted butter, and I used Earth Balance which, a quick check confirmed, is salted. If I were to make this recipe again, I would certainly reduce the amount of salt added to the dough.
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| The finished product. |
I was excited to see the challenge this month, and happy that our results came out so much better than our first attempt at this recipe. Overall, I had a good time, and look forward to making other pastries in the future.
New tools/ ingredients: Hollow Rolling Pin
Recipes used: from Daring Baker Challenge
Co-bakers: Allyson
Date: Sept 24 and 25, 2011
