This is a croissant dough filled with raspberry jam but you could make croissant - which is what I started out to do. The original version is from a Tartine croissant recipe. I made mistakes but here it is. The result was stunningly fluffy:
Starter: I bought new organic rye flour. Mix 50-50 with water. Next day: discard 1/2 and re-fill, repeatedly, for several days until, when you check the brew, it is good and foamy.
Leaven: mix a tablespoon of the foamy starter with a cup of water and a cup of flour. Rest in fridge overnight.
Poolish: mix one tsp of (freshly purchased) active dry yeast, one cup water, one cup flour. Rest in fridge the same night.
Dough: Mix Levin, Poolish and one cup of room temp milk, 3 tablespoons of sugar, one more tsp of yeast, one tsp of salt. Now stir in three cups of flour. If you can get a bit more flour in, go for it, but do not make the dough too tough and dry. At this point I kneaded it for five or so minutes. It should be a little silken.
Rest dough for an hour, then fold it in on itself in each of four directions. Repeat this in-folding two more times after 1/2 hour intervals. Then put dough in fridge for at least three hours.
Folding in the butter: Soften 1 3/4 sticks of unsalted butter. Fold into an envelope of the dough - following standard croissant techniques: a flattened disk of dough + a rectangle of butter inside the circle of the disk. Fold disk edges in from each of four directions and pinch together to envelope the butter....you know. Then do TWO turns. Rest in fridge for an hour and do TWO more turns. [A TURN is rolling it out three times longer than wide, and folding it in three so it is a bit more back to being a square except in reality it is a rectangle in the perpendicular direction. Then you "turn" this ninety degree and do it again. That is TWO turns.] The original layer of butter has been tripled twice and then twice more, so 81 layers.
Important note: you want the dough and the butter to be cool during folding. You do not want the butter to be softer than the dough or harder. I re-cooled the butter slightly after forming it into a rectangle. For this purpose, I put it between sheets of parchment paper and put in fridge. Then I rolled the dough out into a disk, then I took the butter out of the fridge and unwrapped it onto the disk.
After the "turns" and the final resting of the dough you are (almost) ready to use it and store it. The above recipe makes five cups of flour - worth of dough and after it becomes a butter layered wonder, I cut into three pieces and and froze two of them is separate saran-warp coverings. But then I made a mistake and went directly to rolling out and rolling up some croissant. The error was that after the butter folding, the dough and butter were near room temperature. One key is that you need to cool it down one more time after that. Then roll the croissant or, in this case:
Making the turnovers: Roll out the layered dough/butter into <1/4 inch thick layer. Cut up into three inch square pieces. For each, put a tsp of raspberry jam in the middle of the square, fold one corner up and over to its opposite side, then use a fork to try to pinch together seams along the outer edge leaving a little pocket with the jam. It probably won't work, as the pastries tend to split back open during the next step but don't agonize. Place each finished pastry on a baking pan with parchment paper.
Rest the pastries at room temp, covered, for about three hours. Here the dough should really puff up.
Bake at 425 F for 22 minutes. I was not able to wait for them to cool.
No comments:
Post a Comment