I fine tuned this recipe for quite a while. It started back last summer and I need about a year until I was nearly satisfied with the croissants. The crumb could still be more open but that is only a question of practise. Theoretically you could use more butter for the tourage (300-500g) but for me the croissants are then way to fatty. And so I keep practising and share the recipe meanwhile with you so you can start practising as well 🙂
The light and flaky layers of puff pastry, croissants or Danish pastry is created by enclosing butter layers in the dough, something called laminating. The butter layers seperate the dough layers and trap the steam during baking creating the typical honeycomb structure.
When laminating two different kinds of folding the dough can be distinguished: the single fold and the double fold
For the single fold the dough is folded in thirds like a letter.
For the double fold the dough is folded from both sides into the middle and then fold in half.
When rolling the dough after folding to a square again, I always roll in the direction marked in the photos above, starting in the middle to remove trapped air.
I can not belive it but it is already my second Blogversary. Since my first Post I wrote 174 Posts and got 970 niece comments. Thanks to all of my dear readers!
To celebrate I baked croissants because a birthday needs a special treat.
The recipe is similar to my other recipe for croissants with Pâte fermentée that I posted about one year ago. But this recipe contains more butter and because I did two single folds and two double folds the dough contains 144 layers.
This 144 layers make the croissants crisp and flaky and they taste delightful buttery.
I froze most of the croissants after proofing, so I bake some for Sunday morning breakfast. When I start with a cold oven I can bake the without defrosting. Just the time for baking has to be about 5 minutes longer. Continue reading