Chocolate croissant
I am going to try my hand at croissants this week - first time. I am going to do chocolate filled ones cuz why not? (they are for dessert for my cooking club, the theme is to make something we have never made before) Does anyone have a recommendation for a fairly foolproof recipe. I bake a fair amount and have conquered my fear of yeast bread but the thought of puff pastry and croissants is daunting. I have looked at Rose Levy Beranbaum's recipe as well as King Arthur's, they seem similar but King Arthur's seems a little easier to follow (maybe because it has pictures?) Any suggestions would be appreciated!
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8 Comments:
I took a class this fall at Le Notre in Paris in croissant and pain au chocolat making. It's very technical and takes about 9 hours from start to finish. My first advice to you is to be prepared for it to not be perfect.
One thing they told us that seemed pretty important was to preferably use chocolate that is specifically intended for use in pain au chocolat that has a very low amount of cocoa butter in it. Here is a French site that sells them, as you can see, these have only 44% cocoa butter:
http://www.patiwizz.com/catalogue/baton_de_chocolat_large_300b_cacao_barry.php
The reason is that higher fat content chocolate will melt and run all over the place. That's not to say that it shouldnt be sweet. You do want it to have the same amount of sugar as chocolate you would eat normally. If you have a good professional bakers supply store near you, they might have them. Otherwise, using regular dark chocolate should work, but it might run, so try to find one that has at most like 60% cocoa butter.
We were absolutely rigorous in all our measuring. They called the croissant dough a "base 54" dough for the following reason: they had us measuring the temperature of the flour, adding that to the ambient temperature of the air in the kitchen, subtracting that from 54, the remainder gives the temperature (all in degrees celsius) that the liquids to be mixed into the dough must be (milk, water etc).
There were precise amounts of time to wait between risings of the dough, and temperatures and humidity levels (hygrometrie) at which the formed croissants and pains au chocolat had to be steamed in the oven with a warm water bath before baking.
Amounts of water, milk, butter, flour etc. were all weighed in grams as opposed to the less precise measures by volume which we tend to use (cups, tablespoons etc.) It just went on and on like this...
While I feel like they taught us very well and explained everything thoroughly, I have not yet attempted to do it at home, just because it's an all day affair, you need a lot of counter space to roll out the dough, and you need precice equipment, like scales and thermometers (which I now have...)
So, to make a long story short, it's a major undertaking and it requires a lot of precision and discipline. I know you can do it! Please dont let my comments discourage you, because after all, it was a lot of fun to learn something so technical, and please do let us know how it went.
If you want, I will go get my recipe and notes from the class and transcribe them here for you, even if you dont end up using it. It was an amazing eye opener to me, and made me appreciate the amount of hard work and degree of craftsmanship put into each and every little delicious croissant and pain au chocolat and only increased my level of admiration and appreciation for the patissiers.
Hmmm, this makes me want to try it. Maybe I'll do it next weekend when I have a whole day to devote to it. Anyway, sorry for the loooong rant. Good luck! And again, let us know how it goes.
seyo at 12:33AM on 01/20/08
Gulp...now I am even more nervous. I do have a scale and a thermometer (one of the recipes I looked at was pretty specific about butter temp). I am still up for the challenge but will not expect perfection! Maybe I'll make some brownies as a back up. thanks for the advice
mrsmoosie at 12:42AM on 01/20/08
LOL, no!!! My intention wasn't to scare you off. It really was lot of fun. Of course, it helped to have a top notch chef there showing us how to do it, but you will learn a lot. I'm sure it will turn out well, and then the next time you do it it will be even better. Come on, give it the old college try! I promise to do it next weekend and share my results with you, good or bad or anything in between. There's no shame in failure, only in not trying!
seyo at 12:52AM on 01/20/08
Congrats to you for trying! I have always been too chicken to try my hand at croissants.
There is some video from Baking With Julia on line here of Esther McManus making croissants. My recollection from watching the series is that she made chocolate ones but I don't know if the online video demonstrates that version.
Some day I'm trying this too!
kjgibson at 1:12AM on 01/20/08
Watched some of that Julia video ... she does demonstrate chocolate as well as plain croissants. And dough making from start to finish. Looks like it may be the whole episode online.
kjgibson at 1:21AM on 01/20/08
I'd also be interested in a good recipe.
I decided to make croissants one evening (a decision that found me removing dough from the refrigerator in the small hours, so I could fold the dough on schedule), and used the first half-way decent looking recipe I found online
( http://www.baking911.com/recipes/pastry/croissants.htm ).
I too decided to make (some of them) with chocolate inside, but, figuring it would leak, kept the pieces close to the centre of the folded croissant, so that as the dough rose, it sealed iteself entirely around the chocolate.
For me, the steam bath was the sticking point: butter oozed out of the croissants, all over the tray (which fortunately had sides), and the croissants themselves spread out like fatigued jellyfish.
The finished items, though still rather flat, did rise considerably from their slumped out half-centimetre thickness, and the texture of both the inside and the crust was spot on.
I made the recipe again, this time slightly reducing the amount of butter, and skipping the steam bath, to see what would happen. The results were very similar, though the (previous batch) steamed croissants were a bit fluffier, and the surface a bit more bubbly looking. I wouldn't skip this step again, and perhaps half the butter is supposed to leak out?
I would love to see the results of a more precise approach; although I usually use weight rather than volume when baking, I don't have a hygrometer (yet).
mrsmoosie, I agree with seyo, it really is worth trying, and odds are the results will be good; seyo, would you consider posting your recipe and class notes to the 'recipes' on 'seriouseats'? I'm sure that would be appreciated by many of us...
mongoose at 5:56AM on 01/20/08
King Arthur Flour recipes are tested so carefully - I think you'd get a great end-product, if not a truly authentic one.
SSMom at 8:32AM on 01/20/08
I will definitely post the recipe along with my notes, and I also have some pictures from the class. I guess I can put them up on flikr.
SSMom, you are probably right about the King Arthur recipe. I'd be very curious to try it too.
seyo at 2:43PM on 01/20/08