FLAKEY HOMEMADE CROISSANTS (Beginner Friendly)

Hey what's up? I'm not going to lie, making

croissants

at home is tricky, time consuming and it took me a lot of tries to figure out this process, but the final product is so good that it's definitely worth some effort, so today I'm going to show you how to make a flaky croissant. and buttery hand-rolled at home and a few tricks so you can get it right first. Try to start. I have my stand mixer set up and in the bowl. of that I am going to measure 165 grams of warm water 165 grams of whole milk 8 grams of yeast 50 grams of sugar 515 grams of all-purpose flour and 10 grams of salt put the dough hook and I like to mix this dough in two stages, the first of which happens at medium speed for about two or three minutes, all we're looking to do here is get the water and milk to hydrate the flour once everything has come together and the dough starts to push around the In a bowl like this I will take 40 grams of softened butter and start the second stage of this mixture, as you can see the butter is cubed into smaller pieces so I can add them one at a time, this should help.

The butter is better incorporated into the dough but inevitably there will be some spreadable butter stuck to the inside of the bowl and don't worry because eventually the dough will start to grab it all now that the butter is in the dough we really need to knead this. things so the speed is going to increase and I'm going to continue mixing this for a full five minutes and if you're wondering, hey bry, can I do this by hand? Well, yes, but it will be more difficult, start by crumbling the butter. flour as best you can, then mix the dry with the wet, that is, the water and milk, which will take a second to come together and then we can turn the dough out of the bowl and start kneading by hand on the cutting board for six to seven minutes, this will replicate the high speed mixing we are doing in the stand mixer, this is a messy job and will be a little greasy but if you really try you will end up with something that will resemble dough from a stand mixer. stand safely and voila, hand mixed croissant dough, if you dare go back to the mixer, this has been mixing on high speed for five minutes and the dough is clearing the bowl and should be quite strong, but there is only one way to know for sure. so I'm going to turn it over and give it a good tug to see if we like it and it doesn't break or break, and that means the gluten is ready to break down.

Now I'm going to turn a medium bowl over and To give us a more even starting point for when we roll this dough later, we're going to roll it into a nice tight round ball and the motion here is just what we do for most of these stretches. and folds in our dose. I'm just trying to get that ball into a nice tight little thing, yeah, that looks good. Now I'm going to put the lid on and throw it on top of my refrigerator out of the way for 90 minutes in the meantime, when you figure out probably the most important part of a croissant, the block of butter, that's what I'm starting with two large sheets of parchment paper. .

I also have a ruler here and then a pen to make some lines now on the top of that parchment paper. I'm going to make two points in the center eight inches apart and then from there I'm going to use the ruler to draw two straight lines going from the top and bottom to show where I want my butter to sit next. I'm going to fold deep creases into the parchments on the two lines I just drew, this will help hold the butter firmly, then I'll fold the top about an inch or two and then the bottom another inch or two and there we go, we should have two rectangles approximately twenty by 30 to 35 cm high.

Now for the butter, this is a whole block or about 225 grams of Irish grass fed butter called kerrygold and it has 82 butterfats, you can definitely get away with regular butter. but it may take a few tries to get to the point where you are laminating the dough. If you don't do it right, you'll end up making a brioche that's still good, but it's not the same as a croissant that this butter has been sitting on. at room temperature for about 45 minutes so that it is soft and well-tempered, but definitely not mushy. This is the perfect place to make a block of butter.

Okay, roll this butter into a sheet that we can laminate to form a dough. We're going to place this block of butter in the center of the parchment that we just folded and then we're going to cover it with the second piece of parchment and then we're going to flatten this block a little bit flatter into a blob of butter. Fold all four sides of this parchment paper to seal in the butter so that when we spread it out nothing escapes. Then I'll turn it over so the folds are facing the board and now I have a nice square. flat compartment that will help shape our block of butter using a rolling pin.

Now I'm going to beat this butter sideways to flatten it and start spreading it. I'm going to use this motion a lot from now on because when we're shaping large chunks of butter, it responds much better to blunt force like this than to the pressure of a rolling pin. Once things are flat, we can start rolling the roller and see why all that extra effort to fold was worth it. The rolling pin easily pushes this butter right into the perfectly square corners of this paper and it's extremely satisfying when you see it fill that corner. The work is worth it for that alone, once this butter has been pushed into all four corners and spread into an even thin layer, no gaps or cracks, take a look, it is malleable and flexible and will be much easier to stir into the dough, for now I'm going to throw this in the refrigerator and keep it chilled until the dough is ready, talk about frozen look.

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I'm going to pull this out until it's about 18 inches tall and eight to nine inches wide, this is kind of a preform and it's going to allow us to push this dough and butter out further in a few minutes. Then I'll lay down some parchment so I can fold. this dough in half without sticking to itself, then on a tray it is placed at room temperature at this time and it needs to be much colder for lamination, so in the refrigerator it remains for 20 minutes and in the meantime it comes out of the refrigerator . The block of butter we made earlier is very cold and brittle right now, but 20 minutes at room temperature will make it pliable like it was before. 20 minutes later the block of butter should be much more pliable, but it's always good to unwrap it and check it before moving it.

Go ahead, if there was a key to successful

croissants

at home it's keeping the butter in this flexible state. Advance. Hard, cold butter is bad. Flexible, malleable butter is very good. Okay, my piece of dough is nice and chilled after 20 minutes in the refrigerator and now. I'm going to extend this a little further. I want it to be about 18 to 20 inches tall and about eight to nine inches wide. Notice that I'm trying my best to keep right angles around the edges here, but no. Don't worry, we're not really looking for perfection. Now I'm going to increase the size of my sheet of butter and it should be a little less wide than the dough, which looks pretty good, so I'm going to turn it over.

Note that this butter only covers about two thirds of this dough and that is by design, the first fold here is kind of a cheat, we are going to set the butter in the dough and our first two layers of folding will be done at the same time . It gives us more time at the optimal temperature point and, in general, makes the lamination process much simpler. Now to make this fold, I'm going to take the top third of the dough and fold it over the middle third, then I'm going to take the bottom third and fold it over so that when I turn it over you can see how we already have two layers of butter in this dough and we don't we need to work the dough at all and the butter hasn't changed temperature yet, which is ideal now.

I'm going to flatten this a little bit with the rolling pin to help seal in the juices and then on the open side, I'm going to seal things in with a firm pinch from top to bottom. If this butter came loose on my cutting board, I would. it's going to be a disaster now I feel good about where the temperature of this butter is and I don't think it's had enough time to warm up and get too soft yet, so we're going to move forward with the second fold at this point again. I prefer to use the blunt force of the rolling pin to do most of the work when the dough is thick like this, it helps spread the butter more smoothly.

Too much downward pressure on a localized spot with the rolling motion will press the butter into the pockets and that's it. It's not very cold once this slab smoothly turns into an eight inch wide, 16 and 18 inch tall slab once again I'm going to do a book style fold, this time the right side is folded towards the middle and then the left side is folded towards the middle. and then everything will be folded in half and we basically quadruple our layers without any additional rolling. This is just another inexpensive way to simplify the lamination process to save time and therefore preserve the temperature of the butter we basically get. two layer folds in one motion, okay, I have this book shape flattened into a slab, but the butter is starting to warm up and the dough is starting to break up a little, so I'm going to throw this in the refrigerator. so that the dough can relax and this butter can harden a little, so that in the refrigerator it stays for 20 minutes, after those 20 minutes, the temperature of the butter has been restored to that completely pliable point and the dough is It has relaxed enough for us to roll it up. thin it into a croissant so that the board is spread and the dough is spread on both sides and then using a rolling pin we will gently pat it even flatter.

I'll give it four or five passes until it's about half thick. like when we started and if you see some air bubbles in there, go ahead and pop them. I'm going to use a cake tester to prick them and then use my rolling pin to push out the gas. I'm going to extend this. Two stages, if we work too much here the dough will start to harden and we won't be able to roll it out anymore and the butter will get too soft, so once we're at a 12 by 16 inch slab of fish I'm going to put this back in the refrigerator for 15 minutes, after those 15 minutes we'll move on to the second half of the shaping process, where we take this out of the last 30 to 40 percent.

I want to reiterate that do not use it downwards. Excessive pressure from the rolling pin, hitting it with the rolling pin makes things move a little faster and keeps the butter a little more intact. Cut to what happens when butter is too cold and use just a little bit too. a lot of downward pressure on the roller, as you can see shards of butter, the butter is completely cracked and broken and this is a very unfun thing to happen, so be careful cutting the slab, I have it rolled into a quarter sheet inch thick which is Approximately 14 inches tall and 18 to 20 inches wide and don't worry the centimeters of all of this will be in the description.

Now I'm going to square the edges real quick and then using a ruler I'm going to mark every four inches or so. at the bottom and then at the top, I'll move two inchesand then I'll mark every four inches. This will create eight croissants in total. Now, using a pizza cutter, I'll cut them into even triangles, as best I can, hopefully, for when the time comes. You get to the end, your eighth croissant won't look as sturdy as mine, but it doesn't really matter, all the hard work here is done in the lamination and if these aren't perfect, I'll stretch them now. a little bit I want to add two to three inches of length and then once they're stretched I'll go to the wide end and stretch it out about another inch, this will give these croissants a professional tapered look from there.

I'm going to roll this up tightly trying to keep the thin end in the center. I also like to try to keep the tip of the croissant tucked into the bottom. Now I'm going to move this to a tray lined with parchment paper and I'm going to roll out the other seven and mention feel free to freeze half of these once they're rolled out, I would freeze them on a plate and then transfer them to a bag to store them. Then the next time you want a croissant all you need to do is defrost them and then bake them once they are rolled out, now we need to taste them so I'm going to take them into my oven where I can create a little proofing cabinet to do that.

I have a shallow pan filled with boiling water. water and I'm going to load it into the bottom of the oven, that steam will heat the box a few degrees and keep things a little moist so nothing dries out. Fermentation time will vary quite a bit depending on the temperature of your dough and your house, but mine took 90 minutes to be fully prepared and check them out, they look amazing. Now I'm going to set my oven to 425 degrees 218c and while it's heating up, I'm going to go back to Proof These crissies and the egg wash twice to do that.

I just cracked an egg and added about 20 grams of whole milk and scrambled it. That little bit of milk in the wash will help with caramelization because the milk salads brown nicely afterwards. After 20 minutes, we will brush them a second time and also check that they are sturdy, give them a push so that the dough swells a little and then comes out slowly. They look great once we have two filled. layers of beaten egg and the oven preheats in the oven, they last 18 to 20 minutes, if we get the proof right, these should start to rise a little bit and start to unfold all those layers, an under proofed croissant will leak a lot of butter. and it doesn't really rise in 10 minutes, we are going to rotate and flip these pans to get a much more even baking as we know that most ovens have hot and cold spots and when it comes to butter and sugar combined into a dough these They can go from perfect to burnt faster than we'd like, the last eight or ten minutes should be uneventful, but resist the urge to take them out too soon, channel your inner flesh here and bake these dark blonde croissants, they're just not as good. also the tan ones, I know from experience that after 18 minutes in the oven it's time to take these things out and all I can really say is wow, they are polished with a deep golden brown crust and as you can see, all those layers of butter they have come together to make a puff pastry but delicate, this smell, guys, the smell is crazy.

I have cooked many tasty things here in my house but none of them smelled like this sweet European butter covered with care and the baked perfection is just Amazing, when I cut one you can see how flaky they actually are, like I said these are not the easiest things to do right, they're demanding and there can be a lot of trial and error, but in the end when you get there you have a buttery, flaky, fresh, warm croissant that you made and it's world class guys, let's eat this