Some tools you will need to have on hand:
-plastic wrap (sorry, Eileen, no way around this one)
-a pastry brush
-a rolling pin
-a yardstick or measuring tape
-parchment paper
-jelly roll or half-sheet pans
-clean kitchen garbage bags
-bench knife (you don’t really need one, but it’s kind of helpful for dividing the dough and scraping up the butter)
The first step is to get a good recipe for butter croissants and read, read, read it. I’ve found that baking experiences are always better if I have a vague idea of what the steps are and there are a lot steps in this one! I use this recipe at Epicurious.com. It hasn’t failed me yet. This is a recipe for laminate dough which can be used for many different things—not just croissants—so don’t be surprised that this recipe only takes you through the folds stage. They’ve got another recipe for making the dough into croissants. More on that later.
Let’s talk about time. Yes, this recipe does take a lot of time, but you’re not active for most of it. It does require you to be available for a good portion of said time, though. My preferred way of recipe execution is to start around 4 pm the night before I’m making the croissants. It means you’ve got a nice evening of doing folds in between loads of laundry or episodes of a TV show and allows you to proof in the morning while you’re working out (have to burn off all the calories we’re going to consume eating the flaky deliciousness). You can really do it anytime it fits into your schedule. Expect that you’ll need to be available for 5 hours during folding period and 4 hours when you’re rolling out, shaping and proofing the croissants. (I know this sounds like a lot of time, but remember, you just need to be available. This is not active time. The croissants have to proof for 2 – 2 ½ hours, so you have plenty of time to run some errands, just keep an eye on the clock so they don’t over-rise.) Factor in that you need to let the dough rest in the fridge for at least 8 hours, and the evening/night/morning schedule seems to work out best. But hey, maybe not in your household.
Get your mixer out. Don’t have a Kitchenaid? I’m sure that you could do this by hand, but it will take more elbow grease and you’ll need to increase the kneading time significantly. Ready? Let’s get to it!
In your mixer bowl, throw in the following:
1 tablespoon + ¼ teaspoon of active dry yeast*
1 ½ cups 2% (or whole) warm milk**, heated to 105-110 degrees
¼ cup packed light brown sugar.
*I usually use instant yeast in my other baking so I can skip the yeast proof process, but this recipe calls for active dry. Since I have some on hand and wouldn’t use it otherwise, I haven’t been bold enough to ditch it and use instant. Once I run out of active dry, I’ll try the instant yeast, but until then I’m really loathe to tamper with what works.
**No matter how much you’re trying to cut fat and calories DO NOT use skim milk. Skim milk does not act like milk during baking—it acts like water. If you drink skim milk at home, more power to you, but pick up a small 2% milk for this recipe alone. (The recipe calls for whole milk, but 2% has always worked just fine for me.)
CONFESSION: I’m a total loser when it comes to estimating the temperature of things, so I have to use an instant read thermometer to check the temp of the milk. I bet moms are super-good at this with all the bottle temperature testing. (Heather, I’m looking at you.) I heat the milk in the microwave in 30 second intervals, checking after the first two blasts and after each one thereafter. Here I am, checking the temp of the milk. A little warm, so I let it cool on the counter for a couple of minutes.
Stir the ingredients together a little bit. You don’t need to mix it much, just a couple of turns in the bowl with a spoon is fine. Walk away for five minutes. Spend it clearing a good space in your fridge.
When you come back it should look foamy like this.
If it does, you’re golden. (If it isn’t, something is up with your yeast…or the temperature of your milk. In any case, it’s not going to work, so ditch it and start over. )
Add the following the mixing bowl:
3 ¾ cup unbleached all-purpose flour^
1 tablespoon kosher salt^^
^Flour brands do matter. I always bake with King Arthur Flour because I know they’re persnickety about the milling process and I find I get the best results with it. But if you can’t get it in your area (and it is kind of expensive) then stick with Gold Medal flour. Store brands…well, you get what you pay for.
^^Seems like a lot, but trust me, you want salt in croissants. Oh, the FLAVOR!
Slap the dough hook on your mixer and mix the ingredients together. You’ll knead it for approximately 7 minutes on the first speed if you’re using your Kitchenaid. You’re looking for a very smooth (baby’s bottom comes to mind), slightly sticky dough.
See those strands sticking at the bottom? I know it looks like a sticky mess, but it really doesn’t cling all that much to your hands.
Dust a little bit of flour on your work surface. Take the dough out of the mixer and knead by hand for a couple of minutes. This is less about the kneading process and more about incorporating a little more flour into the dough until it’s a little less sticky and more manageable. This is always best done by hand.
Form the dough into a 1 1/2 “ thick rectangle. Wrap it in plastic wrap (turn away, Eileen) and chill it for an hour. Time to go watch an episode of Justified!
Hour’s up? Okay, time to shape the butter. This is the most bizarre step when you’re making croissants. I still giggle every time I do it.
Take 3 sticks (1 ½ cups) cold unsalted butter# and lay them out horizontally on a counter.
#I use Whole Foods 365 organic unsalted butter. I’ve used higher fat butter, too (like Président or Plugra butter) but I get the same results that I do with the regular fat butter. I do organic because my stomach reacts less to organic dairy than it does with non-organic dairy, but I’m sure you’d be fine with the regular stuff.
Grab your rolling pin and start whacking the butter. Seriously. Pound it. Take out all your frustration on it. You’re trying to get to a point where the butter becomes malleable but is still cold. Feel a little nuts doing this? Oh, it gets better. Grab a clean kitchen towel† (I always struggle to find a clean towel without dog hair on it—thanks Ruth) and place it on the counter.
Scrape up the butter mass with a bench knife or sturdy spatula and plop it on the towel. Cover it with another towel (or, the other side of the towel if it large enough) and roll it out until it’s about an 8”x5” rectangle. I’ve got a kitchen measuring tape that I keep on hand for these kinds of things. Still giggling? I know I am! Okay, our goal through this entire process is to keep the butter cold, so stick the whole thing—towel and all—in the fridge while you’re rolling out the dough.
†This can’t be a terry cloth towel so I hope you have at least one flour sack towel hanging around. If not, I recommend you add a few to your kitchen stash. My grandma converted me after college and Rick won’t use anything else. They just seem to dry things better.
Get out your dough and roll it out into a 10”x16” rectangle.
It doesn’t have to be those exact measurements, but make sure you’re doubling the measurements of the butter block. You probably already have the dough oriented properly, but if not, the short side should be closest to you now and through all of the folds. Take your pastry brush and brush off any excess flour.
This is going to be a constant when you’re working with this dough. You want the dough to adhere to itself, so you want to keep any flour at a minimum. You will get flour EVERYWHERE in the kitchen. Just pretend you’ve been invaded by the Swedish Chef for a few hours.
Once you’ve got it rolled out, grab the butter from inside the fridge and place it in the middle of the dough.
Fold the bottom up over the butter. Fold the top down over the bottom—like a letter. Brush off excess flour as you are folding.
You’ve incorporated the butter! Yay you! Now you do your first real fold:
Roll out the dough into a 15”x10” rectangle. You shouldn’t have an problems with this yet, but if butter starts poking through the dough, just take a little flour and dab it on the butter so it doesn’t stick. Once it’s rolled out, fold again like a letter. Bottom 1/3 up, top 1/3 down. That’s your first fold done!
Wrap it in plastic wrap and stuff it in the fridge for an hour. Set your timer so you don’t forget.
Do 3 more folds in the same manner, one hour apart.‡ During the last fold, you’ll notice more butter poking out of the dough.
This is normal, though annoying. Keep patting with flour to keep it from sticking.
‡Some pastry chefs say you can do the 2nd and 3rd folds at the same time. I don’t doubt this, but I haven’t tried it yet, so I hate to recommend it. In any case, you’d only save yourself one hour and in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a lot of time.
Wrap the dough TIGHTLY in plastic wrap. When I’m doing the folds every hour, I usually just wrap it pretty loosely, but this will be in the fridge overnight rising like nobody’s business, so make sure your plastic wrap is sealed up. Once it’s in the fridge, it’s time to drift off to la-la land.
TIME PASSES
Zzzzzz… I’m not going to lie. I don’t sleep well when I have croissant dough in the fridge. Too much anticipation.
When I get out of bed the next day, this is what awaits me.
And you thought yeast doesn’t work in the fridge. Surprise! This is why you need to make sure you wrap it tightly. If it busts out of the plastic wrap, it can dry out the dough, which makes it even harder to work with. (If this does happen, don’t freak out. It hasn’t ruined anything. You’ll just be cursing under your breath a lot more when you’re rolling it out.) Divide your dough in half.
Tightly wrap one half and stick it back in the fridge.
Here’s Epicurious.com’s instructions for making up butter croissants from your laminate dough. Personally, I recommend hitting youtube.com and looking at videos of people shaping croissants and rolling/cutting out the dough. I still do that each time just to remind my muscles what they’re supposed to be doing.
Now that you know how to shape the croissants, it’s time to get your equipment together. First, the pans. Place parchment paper in two half-sheet or jelly roll pans. You need shiny aluminum pans to bake croissants or any recipe that has a high volume of butter in it. If you bake them on pans that are typically grey non-stick variety, then the croissants will burn on the bottom before they’re baked all the way through. I personally love Nordicware’s half-sheet pans as they’re sturdy and don’t warp, but any commercial-style uncoated aluminum pan will do. Grab the flour container, pastry brush and rolling pin that you became so attached during the folding process and set them out of the counter.
Dust your surface with a thin layer of flour. You’re going to need it far more than you did yesterday. Roll out the dough to a 16”x12” rectangle—or as close to that as you can manage. CONFESSION: No matter how many times I’ve done this, right about this time is when I think this whole mess has failed miserably and I’ve wasted nearly a pound of butter, several cups of flour and hours of my time over something that should just be thrown in the trash. Cold dough does NOT appreciate being told what to do and the gluten keeps snapping back on you. (Because croissant dough needs to stay chilled, you can’t set it out to warm it up.) On top of that, add the fact that the butter pieces start poking out everywhere while you’re rolling and you keep having to pat them down with flour so they don’t stick either to the countertop or to your rolling pin, which ends up making the dough even stiffer and you really are going to want to throw in the towel. DON’T!!!!! It will all work out in the end, just keep rolling. After a couple of minutes, the gluten settles down and the dough warms up enough to acquiesce to being rolled.
If you haven’t already, align the dough so that the short end is towards you. Cut the dough with a pizza cutter (you can use a sharp knife, too, but I’d rather not since I work on granite and I don’t want to damage the knife or the granite). How should you cut it? Well, that depends on how large you want to make the croissants. For your first time I recommend cutting the dough into thirds horizontally and then cutting isosceles triangles from that. OR, if you want to make larger croissants (which I did this time around) you can cut the triangles from the dough as depicted below.
One thing to note while shaping the croissants that not everyone shows in the videos on YouTube: it helps if you notch the dough as shown in this picture.
It just makes the rolling that much easier. I’ve also noticed that if you hang onto the tail while you’re rolling with your other hand, it makes for a tighter croissant. Maybe not something to try your first time around, though.
You’ll see a lot of videos that tell you to leave at tail on the croissants at the end. Bull crap. It looks stupid if you do it that way. Just make sure the tail is on the bottom of the croissant and it won’t unroll while proofing. Curl the ends towards the end of the tail and put it on the parchment paper.
Once you’ve shaped all of the croissants, stick the pan in a clean garbage bag, invert a glass and stick it on the pan and tuck the open end of the garbage bag under the bottom of the pan. It’s best to set it someplace warm (not hot) where you don’t have a lot of drafts so they proof evenly.
Oh, and “proofing” is the final rise for yeast breads like this. They don’t actually rise that much—the dough mainly gets puffy. You’ll see.
Don’t think the frustration is over! You’ve got another bit of dough in the fridge! Depending on how large your pans and croissants are, you may be able to get all croissants done in one round. If so, fantastic! If not, grab another set of pans with parchment paper so you can shape and proof the second batch of dough right after you shape and proof the first batch. If your second set of pans aren’t shiny aluminum pans, that’s fine. Just let the aluminum pans cool down to room temperature after baking the first round, then transfer the parchment paper with the second batch of shaped and proofed croissants to the aluminum pans and bake the second batch.
Gah! After rolling out and shaping another batch of unforgiving dough, I usually need an outlet to relieve my stress. I have 2 ½ hours before they’re going to be ready to put in the oven (our house is cool, so rising and proofing takes a little longer than most), so it’s the perfect time to take a long run. By the time I’m done, showered and with my hair dry, it’s usually time to fire up the oven and get ready for the baking process.
Ahhh…the run wasn’t the greatest, but at least I didn’t feel like a complete failure while I was running. Time to heat up the oven to bake these puppies!
The secret to the wonderful flaky, crispy croissants in France is that they’re baked in a steam oven. Once I win the lottery, I’ll get a $60,000 steam oven imported from Europe, but until that time, I have to make do with what I’ve got. So, grab a spray bottle and make sure the racks in your oven are in the upper and lower thirds. Heat your oven to 425 degrees. Once the oven is heated, remove the inverted glass (try not to knock it over on any of the croissants) and take the croissants out of the garbage bags. Open the oven door and spritz the crap out of it! Shut the door for a second. Then open it again, place the croissants in the oven—one baking sheet per rack—and spritz some more. Shut the oven door, turn the heat down to 400 degrees and walk away for 8 minutes. Don’t open the oven door, whatever you do. The recipe I use says 10 minutes, I found in my oven, 8 minutes is best. Just keep an eye on them the first time to decide what works for you. By “keep an eye on them” I mean that use the oven door window and the oven light because you’re not opening the door, right? ;-)
After they just start to develop a very light brown on the top of the croissants, it’s time to move the pans around. Switch them on the racks and rotate them 180 degrees. (I have to do this with all my baking since the back of my oven is far hotter than the front.) Bake for another 8-10 minutes. (The recipe says to lower the temp to 375, but I often don’t. I have a cool kitchen and my oven loses a lot of heat opening and closing the door.) Check them at 8 minutes to see if they look done. If not, let them go another couple of minutes. It also depends on the size of your croissants. I made up some real monsters this time around, so I left them go for 11 minutes on the second go-round.
When they get that darker brown look on top, pull them out! Let them cool on the pans for a minute or so, then transfer them to a rack when they’ve cooled down enough to handle.
Julia Childs and her egg wash can totally bite me. How could you get any more beautiful than this? Besides, shiny croissants make me think of shellac.
Let them cool for a few minutes! There’s nothing worse than burning your mouth on the first bite of something delicious. Then you can’t taste the rest!
I prefer my croissants with strawberry jam (homemade, if I have it…I almost never do).
Rick just pops them in his mouth. He says it takes to long to bother with the jam.
Happy Valentines’ Day, sweetie! I love you!
Okay, you know the deal now go forth and create!
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