How to Bake Croissant without Losing Your Mind
 

The crispy, shattering crust of a skillfully made croissant is the stuff of childhood memories in France.  Unfortunately, in America, croissants are the stuff of partially hydrogenated soybean and/or cottonseed oils, sodium benzoate, and high fructose corn syrup.  It’s no wonder that the French can barely contain their hatred for fast food USA.

Of course, the croissant is not even French to begin with, but is actually Viennese and my first understanding of the croissant was as an Austrian treat.  My mother visited Austria with a few friends of hers after graduating college and had swooned over breakfast at her hostel where the owners baked croissant each morning to serve alongside jam and coffee.  As a woman who cooked most all of my childhood dinners herself and from scratch, I knew she couldn’t be talking about the ham and cheese, steam-injected item on the value menu.  It wasn’t until I myself was out of college though that I mustered the courage to attempt making my own homemade croissant.

Butter, Yeast, and Courage 

Courage, you say? To make croissant? Surely you jest, Stumbling Epicure!  Yet, I assure you, making this delicacy takes a long time, has many steps, and is relatively expensive to mess up and have to or suffer sub-par results or worse, throw away.  I cannot deny though, that for the croissant crazy, until you’ve had fresh from your own oven, you haven’t had croissant.

The first reward you’ll receive for attempting croissant is the joy of having an excuse to buy fancy, expensive butter.  Plugra, Lescure, Beurre d’Isigny, whatever you decide to splurge on, it will be well worth your money.  Croissant is basically yeasted puff pastry, and the butter is the primary flavor of the whole thing.   If you’re not going to buy the good stuff, it’s not worth the effort. 

One thing I can’t quite understand about croissant is why every recipe seems to call for fresh yeast?  Yeast, in my opinion is a big pain.  While I love the way it smells and the poofy results it gives bakers, I’ve had bad luck with the stuff in the past and had to embrace my inner garbage disposal to try and salvage my unleavened creations.  Most of my problems stem from using the standard active dry yeast that you can buy at most any grocery stores.  It either won’t proof right, or I scald the poor things instead of coaxing them back to life.  So, using fresh yeast feels a bit like an insurance policy if you know where to get it and I’ve had pretty good luck with the stuff thus far.  Unfortunately, it’s tough to find and even in New York City, where rendered goose fat and anchovy extract are only a subway ride away, I only know of one place in Manhattan that sells fresh yeast.  If you’re fascinated by the whole yeast discussion there’s a good summary of the different types here and more of an explanation on how to convert fresh yeast quantities into active dry yeast quantities here.  And, if you’re on the prowl for the fresh stuff, Red Star makes a good batch that’s the bees knees as far as I’m concerned. 

Who You Callin’ a Détrampe?!

To make your croissant you first have to make your détrampe, or yeasted dough, which you can then combine with the butter to make the final dough.  Lucky for all of us this dough can also be used to make most any sort of Danish.  You can also purreé the lot of it, load it into a hypodermic needle and inject it straight to your hips, and butt.  Of course, then you won’t get to taste it.  So, combine your whole milk and honey, yeast, and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer.  Use the dough hook and add the flour, and salt.  Don’t add the salt directly to the liquid or you run the risk of killing all your yeast.  Yes, yes, you could call yourself the salt of the earth then, but you’d have to go get more fresh yeast, and you already read how that’s a pain in and of itself.  At this point, you just want the dough to come together with a workable consistency.  This dough is a rather moist dough, so it should feel like it, but depending on what kind of weather you are having that day, you might need more flour.  In my case, I needed significantly more flour just to get the dough to hold together.  Keep in mind that you’re going to knead this dough, ever so briefly, and the flour on the board will help to round out the consistency.

Once you have something you can work with, knead it on a board or a countertop for about a minute and then shape into a ball.  It’s hard to explain the right technique to do this, but you want the dough to rise evenly, so you need to nurture your dough in order to help it get though puberty.  Basically, if you hold your ball of flour and yeast in your hands, you want to give it a facelift.  That is, you want to have your thumbs on top of the dough, your fingers underneath and push the bottom of the mass upwards so as to stretch out the top.  Remember when you were a kid and you yanked back on your skin to make it look like you were flying through wind at 100 miles per hour?  Okay, well, imagine that dough is your face and imagine you can tuck the excess skin back into your skull to continuously tighten your dough’s skin.  Was that too weird of an explanation or did people get that? 

Anyhow, pop that baby in the fridge, covered, for at least an hour to let it rest and proof a bit.  While you’re waiting, get your butter together and pound it into a single thin square, maybe eight inches by eight inches by half and inch thick.  It’s not a big deal if it cracks a bit, but you want it in one piece.  It’s helpful to leave the butter at room temperature for 15 minutes or so before you try to pound it into the right shape.

Once your dough is rested, take it out of the fridge, and punch it down.  You should now have a soft, very pliable dough to roll out twice as long as the butter and a little bit wider.  You’re going to put the butter down on one half and fold the other half over the top to seal the butter square into the dough, like closing a book. 

Once you’ve done that, pinch the edges together and turn it 90 degrees.  After you turn it, roll the dough out once more into a long sheet and fold it together like a letter, into three equal sized overlapping parts.  You’ve just made one “turn” of the dough. 

Only two more to go, but sorry, you’ve got to wait and hour in between each turn to keep the butter cool and give the dough time to relax and proof some more. 

Each time you take the dough out of the fridge, punch down whatever air has accumulated and then roll it out, starting with the former side of the dough.  You want the seams of the dough to be facing towards your stomach and have the folds on either side of you.  One more important note is to make sure you turn in the same direction each time.  So if you pick clockwise, keep turning the dough clockwise.  After rolling out the dough each time, fold it up like a letter, and pop it back in the fridge until you’ve done three turns total.  After you’re done turning the dough, put it in the fridge overnight to let the dough proof more and develop more flavor.  

The next morning, take out what will be a bulging packet of dough from your refrigerator and punch it down.  Then, roll out the dough into a very long rectangle that measures about two and a half feet by one and a half feet.  Make sure you amply flour your hands, counter, and the dough so it does not stick to anything, including itself.  Cut the dough in half lengthwise so you have two very long rectangles. 

Stack them one on top of another and cut triangles with a sharp knife, pastry knife, or pizza wheel so the base of each one is 4 to 5 inches wide.  Keep in mind that the wider the base is, the wider the croissant will be and the easier they will be to form into their familiar crescent shape. 

Once you have all the rectangles cut, put a sheet of plastic wrap or a damp towel over them while you roll out and roll up each triangle into the croissant shape.  You may have the best luck rolling each triangle out even thinner to create more layers in the final pastry and also to help widen and lengthen the shape of the triangle.  You can also cut a slit in the base of the croissant before rolling them to make it easier to curl the ends into a half moon shape. 

Once you have rolled and shaped all of your croissants, let them rise at room temperature for a half hour so they puff up in volume a bit.  Then, whisk an egg into an egg wash and brush each croissant with the wash.  Now, let them sit uncovered for the next half hour, washing them every 10 to 15 minutes to help them form a golden crust in the oven.  Now would be a good time to preheat your oven.  For a little extra something, I like to sprinkle some maple sugar (not syrup – maple sugar) for an extra level of carmelization and depth of flavor.    

Bake your croissants for 16-25 minutes, depending on how you like them, on a half sheet or jelly roll pan.  You could do it on a regular old cookie sheet, but remember that big thing of butter you put into the dough?  It’s going to start melting and leaking out of the dough in tremendous quantities when it enters the oven and the last thing you need to spoil the smell of yeast, butter, and hard work is scorching, burning fat on the floor of your four and pouring smoke into your kitchen. 

By this time you’ll know if your efforts have paid off or if you’ve really screwed it up.  If you did everything right, your pastry will be puffing nicely in the oven and browning like a champ.  You’ll be able to see how flaky and layered your dough is as a result of your masterful turning and the entire house will be saturated with the glorious, overpowering smell of butter and yeast.   It will have lured neighbors within a 4 mile radius of your home, and have attracted at least two heads of state.  Your friends will be toasting you with their coffee cups and peace will be momentarily declared throughout the world.  French chefs everywhere will feel suddenly comforted and that everything is going to be ok.  You will have achieved greatness. 

Now go, feast on your creations and freeze any you can’t eat fresh within the day.  The best way to reheat I’ve found is to put them straightaway from the freezer into a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes or so.  You could defrost them in the fridge if you like, but they’ll be harder to crisp up again.  And don’t even think about using the microwave.