Day 17: Croissants, Can it Get More Parisienne Than This?

SUCCESS!!!!

I have been anxiously awaiting croissant day for months now and I can officially tell you it was a great success!  First of all, I must say that croissant baking got a lot of hype and I was really scared to try and make them, but they ended up being much easier than I anticipated.  Don't get me wrong, they were not a walk in the park, but they were nothing compared to puff pastry.  Puff pastry required rolling and turning and rolling and turning, but the croissant dough only needed rolled out a few times and we ran it thru a professional machine to make it super smooth.

We actually made our croissant dough on Friday even though we wouldn't be baking our croissants until Saturday.  Apparently 3 or 4 degrees Celsius is the ideal temperature for croissant dough. So we assembled our dough and froze it overnight.  Then, Saturday morning, our chefs took the dough out of the freezer and put it into a refrigerator that was set at about 6 degrees Celsius.  When the dough had defrosted, but was still colder than the inside of the refrigerator, it was time to roll it out and make croissants.

My Croissants

After we made one batch of croissants we used the remaining dough to make Pain Au Chocolat.  I'm sure you've seen these pastries before even if you're not familiar with the name.  They are generally rectangle shaped pastries that are flaky like croissants but have chocolate inside of them.  Mine turned out kind of small, but were delicious nonetheless.

My Pain Au Chocolat

Up close they looked kind of like HoHos.

As I mentioned in an earlier post we used dry butter for the croissant dough.  While we probably can't buy dry butter in the US our chef assured us we could make a pretty good croissant substituting regular butter.  Maybe this year we'll leave croissants for Santa instead of cookies!

Until next time Au Revoir and Bon Appetit!