I’ve put this off for far too long, I mumbled to myself eyeing the boxes of frozen butter. Eleventy-one hundred loaves of bread is plenty to make without having once tried the really-not-all-that-difficult laminated dough. To horribly mix my LOTR movie quotes, I’m going on an adventure! Here’s the deal: determined to make croissants on the same day we were hosting a Memorial Day barbecue I tried to get as much ready the night before. The poolish was mixed and active, the natural levain starter was practically leaping out of its container, butter was unfrozen, and I was ready for a nightmare of folding and rolling. But really, how hard could this be?
There it is, an enriched dough with a hidden layer of butter mixed with flour. Was this the third fold and chill or the second? Who remembers? I was rushing back and forth from the pool to the barbecue to the kitchen, also keeping an eye on a quadruple batch of naturally-leavened and very wet dough I was making for sandwich bread. Roll the croissant dough out, letter fold, roll again, letter fold, and chill. This isn’t rocket science but I found either my simian knuckles were too large or the rolling pin too small because I kept dragging furrows as I rolled. I used the Tartine croissant recipe which has a sock-it-to-me punch triple punch of poolish, natural starter, and straight-mixed yeast in the dough.
Let’s cut to the chase–what did Uncle F$#k-Up mess up? Well, I think you have to keep flipping and folding and rolling the same direction so you are always increasing the number of laminations: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. At some point I must’ve reversed it because the croissant was not as flaky and interlayered with butter as I wanted. And I can now attest what it looks like to see your arteries clogging: imagine 18 croissants slathered with cream and egg yolk sizzling in a lake of molten butter on a cookie sheet. Holy Spetznaz are these things buttery good! Next time I’ll make them with some orange peel and a sugar crust so they are more like morning buns. And then I’ll be the fattest baker in all the land.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
It’s is better to taste good than look good 😉