What are you cooking?

 
This is only my 7th bake in just a bit over 5 years, so it's better if you follow a professional recipe Here is the list of ingredients on Saturday's bake. Prepared everything before going to bed and woke up at 3 AM, taking advantage of the freezer on the other side of the window for resting the dough in the laminating process

Dough
500 g Flour
125 g Water
125 g Milk
50 g Butter
50 g Sugar
50 g Egg (a fresh one)
20 g Yeast (Lievito di birra)
10 g Salt
Honey (, I'm home! )

275 g Butter Slab (82% fat) - made 4 hours before the dough, then rested in the fridge

Optional: tangerines and chocolate

First thing I did is to prepare the tangerine glaze. Put the juice of 1 and 1/2 tangerines and 4 teaspoons of sugar inside a small pot, on the stove, to create a syrup.  I turned off the fire when it was starting to make thicker bubbles. It was basically jam consistency. I decided to keep half of tangerine so I can mix the juice with that jam before brushing the baked goods, creating a smooth runny glaze.

 

For the pain au chocolat I used the legendary Kinder chocolate. Easy to cut in two and have one chocolate for each pastry piece.



It's important to make the measurements for the butter layer(275g square slab) and try to make a nice square. Parchment paper helps because once the butter is chilled, you can easily unfold the paper and set the slap upside down on the dough rectangle.

 

 Close the paper and then use the rolling pin to smooth the surface and get the butter nice and even to the lines you just measured. This is a 18 cm square.

 

The croissant dough is basically brioche dough. I made it by hand mixing all the dry ingredients with the crushed beer yeast and room temperature butter, then I incorporated the water, milk and the egg(that was generously mixed with a fork). Once everything was kind of mixed, I added a tablespoon of honey. It's a nice soft dough so your fingers will get sticky. Don't be an amateur to clean the dough off your fingers, just continue mixing... mostly stretch and fold after everything is mixed together. Then you start to grab the dough with your hand, as much as you can grab, pull up and let go, immediately grabbing it again... just like those Italian mixers where the hook looks more like a hand. After 5-6 minutes of doing this, you can let the dough rest for a minute

The final phase you get your hand between the bowl and the dough and you pull it up from the side of the bowl and keep grabbing it like that while turning the bowl. Do it for a few minutes until it becomes smooth. You will see the dough get some elasticity and not stick to your fingers or the bowl so much. It's holding together nicely. Follow Gerard's method here . If you get tired quickly you can take a rest and then repeat for 2 more minutes.

 

Get a pan, some plastic wrap, which you flour a bit and put your dough there. Fold the plastic wrap so everything is closed nicely. Let the dough rest/ferment for about 2h 30m. For me the room temperature was 19.5 ° C

After 2 hours, I got the butter slab out of the fridge. You let it rest at room temperature for 30 mins or so. *Some quality French butter, you don't need to chill it in the fridge. At 2h 30m, I moved the dough outside to cool it down for 30 minutes more, so a total of 3 hours. You might need to put the butter slab next to the dough in your freezer or outside in the freezing weather  for a few minutes(only if it becomes too soft). Both the dough and butter need to have a similar consistency: soft and pliable. The closer they are in temperature and consistency the better.

 

You need to roll the dough with your rolling pin to about 40 cm x 20 cm and place your butter in the middle. You then fold the dough over the butter, like you close a book. Gently press with the rolling pin so the two layers stick to each other. Make sure you seal both open ends. The seam should be facing you like this "|", and you start rolling gently but firmly, making sure you have enough flour on both the surface of the dough and your table


Once you rolled it to about 65 cm, you make a tour double




 

Then you turn the dough 90 degrees and you roll it again

 


After the second time, you make a tour simple as described in the above photo. Make sure your have a lil bit of flour on the table and move your dough around so it can stretch easier than when sticking to the surface of your table.

 

Congratulations, you have finished laminating your dough    


What I did now is I rested the dough outside in the freezing cold   for 20-30 minutes. It helps relax the dough before the final rolling and shaping our goodies

Make sure your butter doesn't become hard again, or you're This is the first time I get it right. I rolled it to about 4-5 mm thick and to have one side at about over 35 cm. The pain au chocolat will be 15 cm and the croissants will be 20 cm... in length. That's how I did it, you can do it how you like.

 

Now you place your chocolate and then you make the cuts that you then roll. Make sure the seam is always on the bottom once you place your croissants and/or chocolat goodies on the tray

 

This is a sign of a job well done... look at those layers

 

For the croissants I usually make an incision with the knife in the middle of the base of the triangle. If you make a big enough cut and you roll it firm enough, you get nice "ears" like Nik says, and you can give them a nicer/ original shape, but I'm not going to do that

Beat one egg with your fork and brush it on your goodies

 

 

I think I left them rest for about 2 hours or a bit more. Not sure, but they should look like this

 

 

Before baking you brush them with egg wash again and then glaze once you take them out of the oven. You should bake them depending on your oven. For me it was around 25 minutes. Preheating the oven for 20 minutes. I start the bake at maximum heat for 8 minutes, then lower the temperature to minimum and turn the croissants after 12 minutes(half way). I don't have a thermometer... it's an oven from the 80's

 

 

This was my best croissant bake so far. This was also the first time I made pain au chocolat. Well, I'm not even an amateur

 

 

Enjoy

I still have one of each left. You can have them if you like. Btw, do you like them with Cappuccino?

That client sounds like my mother

Nikita wrote:

That said, i would be curious to taste it with the Kinder chocolate, worth to try it. Usually, pain au chocolat (some call them chocolatine) are made with rather classic chocolate.  

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I know, but I didn't have any dark chocolate. Kinder was easy, I only had to cut each in half and I'd have one for each pain au chocolat. In the bakeries I see these bâtons which are perfect.



I would actually fill them with Orangettes