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IrishLass

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Don't get too excited yet- this is only Day 1 of my Laugebcroissant endeavor.

This evening, I made the dough and the butter block, and I put them in the refrigerator to sit overnight to rest and chill. I also made my lye solution. Tomorrow I roll!

By the way, I'm completely new to laminating pastry dough the classic way with a butter block. My usual way of making pastry dough is the 'quick' way that I learned from watching Nick Malgieri's demonstration on Martha Stewart one day about a year or so ago, when I first tried my hand at making pastries. The method works really well for me, but I wanted to try it the classic way, just because, and I'm happy to say that I did it for the very first time only last week to make butter croissants....... and boy did my arms get sore! lol

All that I had to work with was my very lightweight rolling pin, which was not a good plan to say the least. I ended up running out to my nearest Sur la Table store midway through to desperately ask for the heaviest pin they had, and I came home with a lovely, heavy, marble French-style tapered rolling pin, and boy what a nice difference that made! The thing weighs almost 4 lbs and it cut my rolling efforts in half for sure! It kinda makes for a nice cudgel, too, by the way, come too think of it. Hmmm....

Anyway, the croissants I made last week are all gone now (they turned out amazing!), and as I was perusing the interwebs for all things croissant, I stumbled upon a little blip of info in Wikepedia that mentioned laugencroissants, i.e. croissants dipped in a lye wash before baking- like laugenbretzel (lye pretzels). Well, that perked my ears up right quick and I got all excited, and now here we are!

Here is the dough recipe I am using. It's basically Jeffrey Hamelman's recipe, which I just very slightly tweaked for this batch. I used his recipe 'as is' last week, and since the resulting croissants came out so wonderfully flakey and delicious, I thought I'd use it again for the laugencroissants, but with these slight changes (brown sugar for white and 5g more of it; 5g more water and 5g more milk):

510g King Arthur brand All-Purpose Flour
147g cold water
147g cold whole milk
62g brown sugar
43g soft butter
12g active dry yeast
12g sea salt
283g cold butter for the butter block

The dough is so easy to make. I just dump everything (except the butter block) in a bowl together (no proofing or any other kind of fussing about) and mix with my Sunbeam hand mixer with the dough hook attachments for 5 or 6 minutes total. Then I quickly shape the dough (which is a fairly stiff dough, by the way) into a rectangular shape, wrap in plastic wrap and stick in my fridge on a small baking sheet to rest overnight.

The butter block is fairly easy and quick to make, too: I take my cold butter, cut it into 1/2" slices lengthwise, and configure them together into a square-ish shape on a 7 1/2" square piece of parchment that I cut out previously. Then I cover over the butter pieces with another 7 1/2" piece of parchment and commence beating it into a cohesive 7 1/2' square shape. My new cudgel, er, I mean rolling pin, works great for this part, which takes all of 5 minutes to do, if that. Then I wrap it in plastic and stick it in the fridge, too.

Well, that's it for Day 1. Stay tuned for Day 2- rolling day!


IrishLass :)
 
My dough and butter block today, fresh from the fridge:
IMG_2923LaugenCroissants2015A.JPG


Rolled my dough out to 10.5" square and placed butter block on top like this:
IMG_2925LaugenCroissants2015C.JPG


Next, I folded up the 4 corners of my dough over my butterblock like this (I left the last corner open for the pic so you could better see how it's done. After I took the pic, I then folded over the last corner and pinched everything closed to completely encase the butter in the dough:
IMG_2929LaugenCroissants2015D.JPG


Once that was done, I quickly rolled out my 'envelope' of dough and butter to a length of 12" and a width of 8". And then I deviated from Jeffrey Hamelman's instructions and cut my rolled dough/butter in half like this:
IMG_2932LagenCroissants2015G.JPG


Continued in next post (I'm over my limit of pics for one post)
 
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and then I pinched the dough closed over the exposed butter, like so:
IMG_2933LaugenCroissants2015H.JPG


The reason why I did that is because Mr. Hamelman calls for the dough to be rolled out to a single 8" x 24" sheet of dough, and since my marble slab goes only as far as 20" in length, I made things easier on myself by cutting it in two. I put one half in the fridge while I rolled out the other to a length of 12" x 8", which was a quick breeze to do with my new cudgel of a pin.:
IMG_2934LaugenCroissants2015I.JPG


Then I folded it in 3rds, like a letter, brushing any flour off the dough to help the dough stick to itself better:
IMG_2936LaugenCroissants2015K.JPG


Next, I wrapped it in plastic and stuck it back in the fridge and took the other half out and did the same thing to it. When done, I placed that one in the fridge too, and let them both sit there to rest and chill (very important to keep things cold and rested), which leaves me free to do other things for a while.

That is known as turn #1. I will do 3 turns total for this dough.

Mr. Hamelman keeps puts his dough in the freezer for 20 minutes in between turns to keep things properly chilled, but I put mine in the fridge because I have other things to do in the meantime, and I don't want my dough to be a frozen brick by the time I come back for turn #2.

That's the beauty of this dough. It'll wait for you. With the batch of croissants I made last week, I left one half of my dough in the fridge for 3 days before I got back to it, and it was perfectly fine. It rolled out great, proofed great and baked up great. I don't know that I'd go too much longer than 3 or 4 days though, I should think. The poor yeast might be too exhausted by then, maybe.

See you for turn #2!


IrishLass :)
 
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Turn 2 is complete!

IMG_2937LaugenCroissants2015L.JPG


See you at turn 3!

IrishLass :)

Edited to add, it only took me maybe 10 minutes at most to roll out both halves of my dough for this turn. There's something to be said for using a heavy rolling pin and cutting the dough in half, for sure! My arms are thanking me. :)
 
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Turn 2 is complete!

IMG_2937LaugenCroissants2015L.JPG


See you at turn 3!

IrishLass :)

Edited to add, it only took me maybe 10 minutes at most to roll out both halves of my dough for this turn. There's something to be said for using a heavy rolling pin and cutting the dough in half, for sure! My arms are thanking me. :)

This part is very familiar, I make about 2-3 large batches a year. The wonderful thing is once you do all 4 turns you can freeze it for later. It is a lot of work but so worth it when the pastry is done you will have over 400 buttery layers!

Beautiful pictures btw, it is going to be so good!
 
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From a professional pastry chef, great job! You could teach a pastry class. I'm really impressed with your neat rolling and clean edges. That's not easy to do!
 
Turn 3!

IMG_2941LaugenCroissants2015M.JPG


My buddy Dave wanted in the picture, so that's him standing next to turn 3.

Thank you so much Dory and PinkCupcake! That's high praise coming from the both of you. :) I'm a rank amateur/rookie at pastry, but I make a lot of other kinds of bread for my family, so I didn't feel too much like a fish out of water (well, at least not for the most part anyway). lol

About the straight sides and neat rolling- that heavy marble rolling pin that I bought needs to stand up and take a bow. It did most of the work for me! lol That thing is like magic! And all those croissant-making videos I obsessively watched on YouTube came in handy, too.

I was only going to do 3 turns, but do you think I should do a 4th?


IrishLass :)
 
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I always did 4 but follow your recipe please. I've never used Lye wash and there may be a reason why it's 3. Now you know why marble pins are expensive but they are so nice. My favorite pin though is a solid piece of hickory - an antique from the late 1600's. I wish that pin could talk!
 
I'm in an experimental mood- I'm going to conduct one more turn on one of my halves, and leave the other one at 3. We'll see what happens!
 
Welcome to Day 3- Baking Day!

The first thing I did with my dough today was roll out the half that only had 3 turns. I rolled it out to 20" x 8" and then I made tick-marks all across the longest edge closest to me at 5" intervals. Then on the furthest longest edge from me, I first made a tick-mark at 2.5" in from the end, and then spaced the rest of the tick-marks 5" apart.

Next, I took my pizza cutter and connected the top and bottom tick-marks at an angle to make triangles, like this:

IMG_2948LaugenCroissants2015N.JPG




See those itty bitty triangles on either end? I ended up pinching them together to make one normal-size triangle out of them.

The next thing I did was to roll out each triangle a little thinner and longer. I noticed last week when I made croissants, that 12" seemed to be a really good length for being able to get 7 perfect rolls out of each triangle, so that's what I aimed for, although I ended up short (11") on a few and only got 6 rolls out of them, but no biggie. They still taste good no matter how you roll them, if you ask me (yum)!

Once rolled out longer, I cut a little slit on the bottom of each triangle and then rolled them up. I'm not exactly sure what the slit is for yet, but all the videos I watched showed this being done, so that's what I did (hopefully DoryMae and/or PinkCupcake can fill me in on the slit secret):

IMG_2949LaugenCroissants2015O.JPG



Here, Dave is presenting one of my rolled croissants. See how it has 7 rolls or humps?:

IMG_2950LaugenCroissants2015P.JPG



I decided to only shape 5 of the triangles into croissants at this time and freeze the rest as triangles. I tightly wrapped the set-aside triangles in double plastic and stuck them in a freezer Ziploc baggie. I decided not to shape the frozen ones because I wanted to leave the option open of being able to roll some of them up with different things like chocolate or Nutella, or maybe cheese, etc....

Once my chosen 5 were rolled into croissants, I placed them on a stainless baking sheet lined with 2 layers of parchment, covered them over lightly with plastic wrap, and let them proof in my 69F- 70F kitchen until plump and jiggly like jello when my baking sheet was slightly jostled, which turned out to be 2 hours.

Oh- 1.5 hours into the proof, I pre-heated my oven to 425F.

Once proofed, I got out my lye solution (the same one I use for my laugenbretzels), which is made with 50g food-grade lye and 1250g distilled water (a 3.84% solution). I poured, oh, maybe about 1/4 cup of it into a PP #5 plastic cup and commenced brushing the proofed croissants like so:

IMG_2956LaugenCroissants2015U.JPG



After generously brushing each croissant with one coat of lye solution, I went back and brushed them again for a total of 2 generous coats. I decided to brush them with the solution instead of dipping them into a bowl of the solution like I do with my laugenbretzels, because fully proofed croissant dough is too delicate in comparison, and I didn't want there to be any chance that any of the layers that I had built up would become destroyed/deflated.

(continued in next post)
 
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Wow this is awesome, thank you so much for doing this. The slit is so the croissant can be more easily shaped into the moon shape. I don't think it is imperative but it helps.
 
Once all had been brushed with the lye solution twice, I sprinkled each croissant with kosher salt and then baked them on the middle rack of my oven @ 425F for 5 minutes, then I turned the oven down to 350F and baked for 20 more minutes (rotating the tray at the half-way point, and also covering them with parchment-lined foil at that time to prevent the tops from burning/scorching.

Are you ready to see what they looked like when done?

Brace yourselves!

Ta-dah!

IMG_2961LaugenCroissants2015T.JPG


I let them cool for about 15 minutes and then I could wait no longer!

Oh, my goodness! I think I'm in love!!! It was soooooooooooooooooooooooo gooooooooooooooood!

The outside parts that are the brownest taste just like a pretzel, and the rest tastes just like a delicious croissant, and the layers shatter achingly beautiful, just like a croissant should.

Um.....I think I need to make more of these!


IrishLass :)
 
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Thank you again for documenting this recipe! Now I just need to find the time to try it! Looks wonderful, and with a chewy outside and flakey inside - I can't wait!
 
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