Croissants. A fairly common and easy to eat breakfast food. So good when eaten warm. The best ones are flakey, light and buttery. Much work goes into making croissant dough. It was a busy class for us this day.
To get the flakiness in the croissants once baked, the dough must go through lamination. Lamination is the process of rolling fat into the dough through a series of folds and turns. And because the fat being used here is butter, it is necessary to give the dough time to rest and allow the butter to chill slightly before each roll out, fold and turn. The butter should not be melted and soft.
We spent half of our last class laminating our dough and then processed the dough this week. First we flattened our butter. This is the fat that will be rolled in. We simply used a rolling pin to flatten butter between some parchment paper.
The croissant dough is made of yeast, water, bread flour, butter, salt, sugar, milk powder, eggs. We then rolled the dough out, fairly thin but wide enough that we could place our butter in the middle and envelope it with dough.
This week we cut the dough and began forming our croissants. We had chocolate, cheese, almond and of course, plain.
Here’s the croissant haul after baking.
I love being croissant rich! =)
Sweet Spell Bakeshop 