Croissant Troubleshooting - Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes and Love Technique 

Amen!

Milles mercis! Ça complète bien le vidéo. Et c’est super utile !!

Nice suggestion.Thank you

Definitely recommend Sebastien Lagrue’s videos on croissants too. The temperatures are so important. I learned it the hard way.

Hi Camus. Thank you for sharing your experience with us! It’s anyway you can share your recipe as well?

Very nice of you to share - thanks 👍

lol

😂

There are some decent recipes with 250-300g flour as the base. The gourmetier croissant recipe calls for about 300g flour, I believe. It's just a little trickier to work with a smaller quantity of dough, but in general, everything stays the same.

Awesome info, thanks. I recommend 25 layers mostly because that seems to be what my favorite homemade recipes do and get a good honeycomb, I trust their recipes. But the thickness having a big impact makes sense, it's a shame that most recipes don't call for how thick you should roll the dough. I experienced a pretty wide variety of lots of leaking vs. minimal leaking, granted I was obviously testing lots of things and my recipe was not consistent. :P 2 singles and a half fold sounds awesome too, very manageable. I was curious about egg too, I see it's more common in chocolate croissants, where I do notice adding the cocoa does seem to make the dough weaker. I'm also a big fan of big thin butter blocks, I'm always jealous of the fancy French butter that comes pre-cut in large sheets. Question about conditioning butter by beating it...what does that actually do? Does it just beat out air, or does it do something else? Obviously it works, but plenty of recipes don't call for beating/conditioning and seem to get good results.

@@FoodieFindings Thickness of layers is something that comes up more once you've had a few tries. Beyond butter leakage, it does have an effect of the chew, especially if you are using strong flour. Thicker dough layers with strong flour can make a pretty chewy croissant. But that is a matter of preference more than anything. We home bakers generally roll out fairly thick because, well, rolling out the final sheet thin without screwing up the entire process is hard, lol. Also, one other thing to keep in mind when thinking of the final thickness for you croissant; If you use the 5mm spacers for the roll out you will most certainly have a final thickness greater than 5mm when the dough relaxes and retracts. So If your final target is 5mm, shoot for thinner while rolling. It is important to adjust the dough to your process. The reason I started to use the 2 singles and 1 half fold was because the double-single did not yield enough layers(find it more crunchy than crispy)and the others (2 doubles, 3 singles) were very difficult on the final roll out. You can adjust hydration and fat to makes these easier to roll out, but there are trade offs. With the 2 singles-1half, you can roll out your dough fairly long for your half fold, so that you already have the height for your croissants before beginning your final roll out. That way you rarely have to roll against a seam. Makes rolling by hand much easier. Bakeries seem to love the double-single because its much more efficient. I'm pretty sure that trend towards having really long and narrow triangles (ex 6.5 cm x 35) sheeted quite thin is a means of creating a fuller honeycomb while skipping the extra fold of the three singles. For the butter, its seems that bashing it does homogenize the texture, especially for butters that have been kept in the freezer. You alluded to it in one of your other videos, that the crystalline structure of the butter is being affected by both the force from bashing as well as the change in temperature. Not really sure about the science but seems similar to chocolate tempering, with agitation and temperature and aligning fat crystals? Most of the plastic properties seem to be related to the original churning and production of the butter, but these actions seem to help. As for why it works without doing this, I'm guessing it may be related to qualities of the butter you are using. I used a french butter once (not a beurre de tourage, regular isigny 82%)and just shaping the butter block was enough for clean lamination. With our domestic (Canadian) butter, even those with 82-84% butterfat, without some conditioning, the butter performed poorly especially at lower working temperatures. The pliability of the plugra and kerrygold just out of the fridge is just not there for the butters I am used to, tending to be pretty brittle without some work.

@@Vonnegut99 I found a super neat article from a Facebook group that explains "butter manufactured with poor macro milkfat crystal structure...can be improved by applying thorough sheer forces, such as creaming in a stand mixer". Cool stuff. I also definitely experienced "If you use the 5mm spacers for the roll out you will most certainly have a final thickness greater than 5mm when the dough relaxes and retracts", very true. As you say, rolling out perfectly evenly thin is really hard anyways. I love all the little tips to making croissants perfectly. It's the classic Marco Pierre White thing - "Perfection is lots of little things done well."

I've read that losing butter during baking means they are under proofed

Awesome. I have definitely leaned toward longer bake times, I see lots of recipes calling for only 15-20 minutes of baking and that seems so unrealistic to me. Glad to know that long bake time seems like a good thing.

@@FoodieFindings 15-20 minutes may be a recipe that's been adapted from a professional kitchen with a professional oven. That, or they like their croissants far too pale. 25-30 minutes at temps lower than 400F is a decent time range.

I think it has an impact on flavor and also helps develop the gluten in a good way. Some even call for freezing the rolled and shaped croissants before baking, so to a certain degree it's personal preference. At the very least, chilling the dough until its cold makes it better to work with.

That was my problem for the longest time. Here’s a few tips- Make sure to reach window pane consistency after kneading, make sure your dough is hydrated enough, dry dough tends to spring back faster. Rest it in the freezer and then the fridge in between turns.

I think margarine or a vegan butter would have the right texture to work.

Most margarines won't work for croissants due to the low melting point. Same goes for coconut oil, which is almost liquid at room temperature (good luck laminating that). You need to find a good vegan butter alternative like "melt buttery sticks" in the US, or the best one I've tried: Naturli Vegan Block, which is available in Europe, or can be found imported in specialised shops. Your other option is to buy professional margarine used for croissant and other pastries.

Oh! And BLINK! Psychos don't blink. Normal people do.