Making croissants!!!

In my pursuit to learn new cooking skills, I've started taking classes.  Earlier this year, I had private lessons on making pizza and I will share these in an upcoming blog.  Last weekend, I had the honour of having a private session on how to make croissants from Iliana of Iliana's Kitchen.  It was an amazing experience and I now can add this skill to my repertoire.  It was absolutely fun and I look forward to making more croissants in the future.  As you can see from the recipe below, making croissants is not to be rushed. Essentially, you make a dough, allow it to rise, add the butter and through turnings and foldings, this creates layers between the butter and flour.  The water content in the butter will allow the layers to separate during baking. The minimum number of turnings is 3 and this creates over 80 layers.  Then the dough is cut and folded and allowed to rise even more and baked in the final step. Iliana taught me to make plain croissants, almond croissants and chocolate croissants.  The consensus from everyone who sampled our work is the almond ones were the best. I enjoyed the plain ones more...we made a raspberry coulis which went well with the plain ones.  The chocolate ones were also great.  But when is chocolate not great.

Croissants

500 g all purpose flour

1/2 cup lukewarm water

1 cup milk 

1 tsp dry yeast

1/4 cup sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp butter

300 g butter at room temperature (for about 10 minutes)

Prep

1. Place the 300 g butter on a large piece of plastic wrap.  Add another piece of plastic wrap on top.  Flatten the butter with a rolling pin and shape it into a square about 8 inches X 8 inches.  Place in the fridge until ready to use.

2.  Place the dry yeast in a bowl.  Add the lukewarm water and a little sugar (about 1 tsp)...this will feed the yeast and it will become bubbly.

3.  Meanwhile melt the 1 tbsp butter with a little bit of milk from the 1 cup (don't boil).  Add the rest of the milk.

4.  In a bowl, mix the flour with the remaining sugar and the salt.  Add the yeast mixture and the milk with butter from step 3 (make sure the milk and butter are not warm.  It has to be tepid or cold).

5. Mix everything together to make the dough.  The dough should be sticky...if it's hard, add a bit more milk.  Transfer the dough to a lightly floured clean surface.  Knead the dough until smooth.  if during the kneading, the dough becomes sticky, dust if with a little flour.

6. Place the dough in a clean bowl.  Cover it and let it rise until it triples in volume.  If you make it in the evening, put it in the fridge covered and it will rise slowly overnight.

7. Transfer the dough onto a lightly floured surface.  With a rolling pin, roll the dough into a large square.

8. Place the butter diagonally in the middle of the dough.  Fold each corner of the dough over the butter, corner vertices in the middle.

9. Turn the square upside down.  Roll the dough gently in an up down motion to form a rectangle.  Fold the rectangle in three.  Wrap the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

10. Take the dough out of the fridge and roll it again into a rectangle.  Fold again in three.  Wrap and refrigerate.

11.  Repeat step 10 two more times.  It is this folding that creates layers of butter between the flour for the croissants.

12. Divide the dough in half.  Refrigerate one half (this can keep in the fridge for 24 hours and allows you to make a second set of croissants). Roll the dough into a rectangle about 6 inches wide.  

13. Cut out triangles out of the dough.  

14. Starting from the wider side, fold the triangle towards the vertices.  The tip should be under the croissant. 

15. Place the croissants on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.  Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until double in size.  This may take up to an hour.

16. When ready to bake, brush the top of the croissant with an egg wash (whisk an egg in a bowl with one tbsp water).

17. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and bake until bake the croissants until golden (about 20-25 minutes)

For chocolate croissants, at step 13, cut out rectangles instead of triangles. Add a square of chocolate of your choice to the bottom end and roll upwards.  Continue with steps 15-17.

For almond croissants, make an almond paste (below).  Make little logs of the almond paste almost as wide as the triangle. Fold as in step 14 and continue with steps 15-17.  Top with sliced almonds when out of the oven and dust with icing sugar.

Almond Paste

2 cups blanched almonds

1/2 cup icing sugar

1 egg white lightly beaten

1/2 tsp natural almond extract

Place almonds in a food processor with 1/4 cup of icing sugar.

Process the nuts until finely ground.

Stop the processor and add the rest of the sugar, the egg white and the almond extract.  

Process until completely mixed with the nuts and all comes together in a clump.

For the raspberry coulis, we put a pint of raspberries with one tsp sugar in a small pot and simmered until the fruit had cooked and formed a jam-like consistency.

At the end of the class, we made many croissants.  We enjoyed them piping hot with Earl Grey tea with blue flowers.  They were delicious. After this magical afternoon, the rest of the croissants were shared with family and friends.