Croissant Masterclass with Scott Megee

what goes into a

croissant

, well let's take a look, so we start with bakery flour. Bakery flour is important because we need the protein structure within our flour. Flour has five proteins, it has glutenin, globulin, albumin and protease. Gliadin and glutenin chemically bond together to form the presence of water to form gluten, this is what gives the dough the ability to stretch and hold its shape, so 11.5% protein at twelve and a half, Depending on what flour you can get, our second ingredient is sugar, this is what gives us our sweetness, but also helps color our final product.

We also have salt. The salt will give us yeast control. It will also give us crust color in the final product. Something very important that we must have in our dough and we have dry yeast. Now I use a thermos. tolerant yeast this is a yeast designed for sweet based products the other product that I have in the dough in the base dough is just a little bit of butter this butter gives you flexibility and helps you roll out the dough and gives you the ability to fold it well, the other secret ingredient I have in mind is deactivated yeast.

Deactivated yeast is dead yeast cells. What this does is it doesn't give you any fermentation, but it gives you a beautiful flexibility in your dough. You can stretch this dough and it will be beautiful. laminations without giving it long breaks between each fold, the other ingredients we are using is milk, okay, this enriches the product, it also contains unfermented sugar, it is all yeast, so the lactose from my milk stays in my product until reaches the oven. and that gives it that rich golden brown color because of the caramelization of the lactose and I also use water just to combine our ingredients.

The other thing I do to my

croissant

dough is add a small 10 percent portion of the old leftover dough, so this is the dough that has been rolled out and shaped into croissants and all the scraps that I cut the ends, save them and then mix them again with the dough to give it a better flavor. This acts as a test event, so let's start shuffling and placing everyone. We put our ingredients in the bowl and we are going to give it five minutes on first speed. Those five minutes allow the protein to absorb the water and form the gluten that we need and I want about seventy-five percent gluten development in this dough, we're going to form more gluten as it sets and we're going to form more of the gluten structure. gluten as we sheet it, so we can't overmix our dough at this point, if we do so when we sheet it, it will be over.

Stretch the gluten and you will break down the structure within the dough, so it is important to lightly mix the dough. My old olive croissant is cut into pieces and I'll put that in and when we go to second gear, if I were to add that now. portion of the dough would destroy the other portion of dough because it has already been mixed to its full development, so let's start five minutes on the first movement so that it has had its five minutes on the first B. Now we are going to let it mix for a few 30 seconds and then We'll slowly add our leftover dough, this is about 54% moisture or a combination of water and milk, okay, and the extra butter that we put on it will soften it slightly, so the thinner you can roll it out, the more gluten will have. on us it's fine now, as you can see with this one, as I stretch it, it's breaking down, so it needs a little more, it's a very tight dough, but you can see it has a good stretch and a good bounce, which is an indication of gluten formation gladen gives it the ability to stretch glutenin gives it the ability to come back so we want the product to rise and stretch but we also want it to hold its shape which is why gluten is so important in these products, how do we know? this is at 75% we do a window test so what we do is we take a piece of dough and we just stretch it as far as we can and as thin as we can this will tell us how much gluten is in there so the more thin be You can see it and the lighter it is, the more gluten you have, so you can see it's cloudy, but if you can see that mesh inside, there's a lot of gluten in there, it has good bounce, so it's in good condition, this is 12. millimeters, if I now make my butter 12 millimeters, it's going to give us nice, uniform rolling lines across our entire product.

The butter I'm using is soothing butter, it's a cultured butter and this will give our product a slightly natural yogurt flavor, it's like this lactic acid flavor. I think it gives us a really nice flavor profile for our croissant, but you can see it's too hard if I tried to put this on our croissant now it would break our layers, so we have to go through a process called conditioning and it's actually just roll or beat the butter until it becomes soft and pliable and now it becomes a beautiful piece of pliable butter that we can laminate into our dough, so we roll it up to four millimeters.

Now I'm going to do just one. Add my butter, so now I have 12 millimeters of butter and that will match the thickness of our dough. Now the butter is a conditioned dough that we had in the refrigerator for the last 24 hours after we mixed it yesterday and it is now ready to be rolled. so what I do is I place the butter in the middle of the dough then I take a knife and very carefully cut the dough on each side of the butter and then I place the cut portions on top now if this exposes all four sides of the dough and the butter.

I think this gives us better lamination because we get 100% lamination if I leave a crease there. What happens is that we can get portions of the dough that do not laminate correctly, so by cutting it and placing it on top we get a better lamination. Clean, crisp edges to secure butter. I just put a few little dimples in it just to secure it and then it's ready for its first roll. Well, when you put it in the machine, make sure you put it with the cut facing in. the machine, if you were to roll it that way the cut would separate, so lay it out along the machine and let's start rolling it when it rolls it down to about ten millimeters thick, we don't want to stress the dough too much if we roll it down too quickly we can put too much tension on the dough and it becomes a tight dough, okay, so it's ten point five, now what we have to do is do what we call an offset book fold, we get one of our ends.

We fold it three-quarters up, then bring the other edge down three-quarters, making sure our dough meets a nice clean line down the middle, and then we fold it in half again. Now you can start to see how we start generating our layers inside. We always give our croissant dough a 90 degree turn and we always roll it out from our open ends, not our closed ends, so now it's ready to go back into the machine and roll it out for your second roll, the same ones. processes before two increments at a time. time, but there is too much tension in the dough, making sure it hits the roll and is straight.

This time it has been reduced to ten millimeters. This time we're not going to do an offset book fold, we're going to do a simple fold, so we always like to work. with straight edges, so I'm going to trim this straight edge like this and we fold it about in half, we take the scraps that we cut off on one end and we just place them on the inside of our dough to create a straight line and then we fold our right side up and the dough has to come together edge to edge okay and you can see it's a little bit so we'll read fix that there we go and now that goes in the refrigerator and has a rest for at least 20 minutes and just it We cover to ensure that a skin does not form.

They are rolled back through our open ends, not our closed ends, up to ten millimeters again and now we're ready for our last fail, so once again, a ruler, this also helps check that our laminations are in good shape. conditions, with one side facing up, place your scrap. inside making a straight line and then folding it over the top it's ready to go back to the refrigerator about half an hour rest okay allow the gluten to relax and then you're ready to roll and shape our dough you already had your bolt final and your final recipe is now ready to be extended for its final form.

Now we'll run most of the length through the open ends, but I'm just extending it through the closed ends just to get the width I need. You can see that my dough is now sailing towards stress. You'll see rounded edges, which means it's fighting the gluten structure, so at this point we flip it over and now we'll take the lengths out of the open ends, depending on what it does. The size of the croissant and Danish we are making will determine how thick or thin the dough will be. I usually lower it to about five thousand to exert a static force, so it's time to sit for about five minutes to let it stop. the shrinkage of our product and when we cut it and now we need to prepare for both, we're going to scoop out the croissants from the bottom and then we'll scoop out a chocolate on the top, but if you notice I have my dough.

In my world, which hangs over the edge of the bench, everything is based on measurements and you can see that in baking it is a natural product and does not have a straight line, but if we use the bench as a straight line, we can measure correctly. each product, so we'll just cut that edge. The other reason I cut the edge is that it's the rounded edge that doesn't puff up in the oven because all my laminations go in the corners around the bender so we get rid of that and that becomes our rest that we use for our next dough, so now it's ready to make croissant and penner truckle, depending on what we're making.

I usually have my Prasant about 30 centimeters long. I like to cut my croissants by hand. I think it gives me a better product. I get sharper edges if we use cutting as it tends to bend or squish my edges so I hand cut my entire product into 30 centimeters and then the top will become our chokolate panel which will be 14 centimeters by 8 centimeters and now we need to place the chocolate inside it, so there are many ways to do it. This is the way I make it evenly spaced, allowing enough expansion to almost three times its size.

What they are now I'm going to place them in a fermenter. It is very important that we do not want to test this above 32 degrees. Butter melts at 32 degrees, so we never tried anything with butter over 32 degrees, so 28 to 32 degrees max is what you want to try these out there with about 70 to 75 percent relative humidity, so a slightly humid environment prevents skin from forming in the hours when I have squared my ends. Now I am 30 centimeters. go through and mark 10 centimeters wide along the bottom at the top, high five, whatever I did on the bottom measurement, so I made 10, so I went in 5 centimeters and then from that mark 5 centimeters I measure 10 centimeters. that gives me a center point for the triangle, then I cut my triangles to have our 30 centimeters by 10 centimeters triangles.

Then we just need to make a small cut in the base of each croissant about two centimeters, this helps us stretch the croissant a little when we get to roll it, okay and now they are ready to roll, so how do I roll a croissant , try to imagine where they come from, they come from Paris or France and the most iconic image of France is the Eiffel Tower, so I make my product look like the Eiffel Tower, I stretch it, I sacrifice the laminations on the tip and then I roll it from the base up making sure it is centered and when flattening it on the bench your tip will always end up at the bottom of your product so do that again stretch it down about a quarter of the length again roll up the pumpkin keeping the center off the wall ready to go to the rivers, we usually do it for 2.5 to 3 hours at no more than 32 degrees, the recipe I use for my egg wash is whole egg and I like to dilute it slightly with a little milk, but it's very important, then we put a little salt in our beaten egg, this denatures the egg wash and allows you to have this beautiful thin layer on your croissants and Danish, okay, so 16 minutes 180 degrees two seconds of steam yes you don't have steam, that's fine, the steam just gives you a little more volume and you know you have a good product when it starts to wobble.

I'm wobbly, yes I kill, they just live in the wind, lamination is important, you have to have the butter and the dough has to be the same consistency to get really even layers of your product, which shows that they are obviously also very important to make sure To get the maximum volume, this will also give you great flavor because the longer you can ferment something, the better flavors you will get through yourproduct and obviously also when baking we are looking for three colors so I want a golden yellow color and varnish okay so the tips become darker and darker than the middle part what it does is give it three levels different flavors to your product and when you eat it, you experience more flavor as you eat it.

I would consume your product and just be patient with them when you bake them, you have to be patient, so given the time, the time to give them a beautiful color, the time to get a beautiful volume, the time to do it, just the time to bake It is a matter of time and just be patient with the product the product will tell you when it is ready to go it is always good to look at it in natural light because the ovens give you a false reading there we have it some croissants and panitch Alcalá beautifully baked as well as you can see We have beautiful laminations on the sides, a beautiful shine on the top and a beautiful crispy outer layer.

Let them cool and when we eat them they will be delicious. We have gone through the process of making our croissants. Now what? It makes a good croissant, well, let's cut it and see, first of all, I have a beautiful glazed finish on my croissant. Nice and shiny, very attractive and beautiful laminations on the side, but now we have to cut it out and see if that's what's on it. they're like that, just with a nice sharp knife, what we should have is a really open honeycomb finish to our product and there's a nice, beautiful, open structure there, and it would just have a flavor.

I can't even talk, right? There is nothing better than that.