Making your own croissants
…is actually kind of fine?
I am - there’s no point being coy - extremely pleased with these. Oh, the colour could be more even, and the layers have separated a little too much in a couple of cases, but for a first attempt I am fucking chuffed.
They were rich and buttery and slightly sweet. Crispy outside, a little spring in the middle - wonderful. We ate them on their own for lunch. Well, ok, not quite on their own - I busked a white chocolate and cinnamon pain-au-chocolat out of the dough remnants, too. Absolutely do this. It’s an edible heart attack, but delicious.
So, what was involved?
Flippantly: you make a bread dough, turn it like puff pastry, cut it into triangles, roll it up and bake it. Easy, huh?
I mean, it kind of is.
There’s a lot less hands-on time than I expected. If you’ve got a stand mixer it’s half an hour at the start, then three blocks of 5-10 minutes at one hour intervals to do the “turns” (rolling and folding), then assembly, rising, and baking the next day.
That last part’s fiddly, granted.
Croissant crib sheet
(click to embiggen)
I used the Paul Hollywood recipe. You can find it in his How to Bake and I’d head people speak of it well. The only thing I changed was knocking down the sugar. 80g seemed like a lot and as BBC Good food went with 50g, and the excruciatingly pompous but very reliable Bread Matters uses none at all I cut it to 60 and called it a day.
I also watched this YouTube tutorial. It seemed like a good explanation of technique, although the eight-hour rests between turns were a bit much for me - I plumped for single hour rests and an overnight prove.
The dough came together nicely and handled well, so the only tricky part of the first bit was shaping the butter to fit over it. Shoving it between two sheets of cling film and doing a bit of violence on it with a rolling pin did the trick, although once it was thinned out it was easier to roll it a bit, re-chill, and roll again.
The “turns” are rolling and folding. It was a bit nervy at first as I was paranoid the butter wouldn’t stay solid, or would rupture through the dough, ruining everything. The whole turning shtick is to build these laminated layers of fat and dough. For this, the butter needs to stay fairly solid until you bake it, so that it can melt in the oven, letting the steam of the rising bread separate it into those crispy/fluffy layers that make croissants just one of the best things.
Also: butter tastes amazing. I cannot tell you how good the flat smelled while these were in the oven.
The only tricky part (I found. Caveats of luck and privilege apply) was shaping the things. In theory you cut triangles, using the first one as a template, and just roll them up. But I’ve never been a very neat or precise cook, and they did come out a little uneven.
Honestly, if you have the free time I’d recommend giving croissants a go. They are super satisfying to make, and it’s definitely more an issue of time spent than effort expended.
There’s a short process thread on twitter, too: https://twitter.com/RMH40/status/1256962049470578691