Make Perfect Croissants With Claire Saffitz | NYT Cooking

I want to clarify one thing before I start talking about

croissants

, and that is that for the rest of this video I'm going to refer to these as

croissants

and not croissants, okay because I can't, I can't do that. I'm getting so excited every time Hello everyone, I'm Claire Saffits and today I'm going to show you how to

make

croissants as the greatest achievement of all pastry gum. I don't think I'll ever get tired of eating them, so we're going to do basic, everything, butter croissants, ham and cheese croissants, almond croissants, panna, chocolate, there's nothing better than a freshly baked croissant, but somehow It improves when you add chocolate, ham and cheese.

I really want to encourage people to try this at home because it's fascinating and fun. and challenging and like you can get obsessed like I did and just

make

them like 15 times in a row for this recipe. I became like a woman possessed from making croissants. I've made them at least a dozen times at home and there's a lot to learn. Now I'm very attuned to the flaws in the recipes I make, but even in my worst batch they were still so delicious that you can get very, very good results at home like I've never had a bigger thrill than when I pulled them out. eight beautiful layered croissants, golden and puffy, from my oven, croissants are in a category of pastry called vienwazuri and, generally speaking, they are pastries that are called laminated, so laminated is a kind of technical pastry term in Slang for a layered puff pastry, butter is rolled into dough. it spreads and folds and spreads further and this creates a series of sheets of butter separated by layers of dough and that's what creates this layered crispy effect in things like puff pastry and danish pastries and of course croissants, there's a lot What to talk about in this recipe, if I were editing this video, it would be like a four hour video, so to adjust the recipe so that you can have freshly baked croissants before noon, we do this over two days, so it's

perfect

for a weekend baking. project where you will do most of the work on a Saturday and then on Sunday morning, you will wake up, form the croissants, let them rise, and bake them on the second day.

The first step to making croissants is to make something called ditch at home and that. It is the dough we are using that will enclose the butter for our lamination. I'm going to say this at every point in this recipe, this step is very important and you need a strong dough to support all those layers of butter and to not collapse when you bake it in general if you can find a flour between 11 and 13 protein which is a good selection something in that range that's what I recommend now I have to talk about yeast again so many things to talk about I'm using dry acne yeast because for people at home it's by far the easiest type to find almost everywhere the recipes I have made with active dry yeast.

I'll tell you to activate the yeast or proof it, which basically means dissolving it in a warm liquid 99 times. of 100 your yeast is alive and fine. I'm pretty sure you can mix it directly into the dough. I've never had a problem doing it at home. It's 12. 120 grams of whole milk the first thing I want to do. is to hydrate everything and make an initial mixture, so I'm going to start by mixing this on low so it looks dry and shaggy, but let the mixer run for a few minutes and it will come together, so here we have our initial mixture. the dough mixture looks something like a cauliflower it's not soft it doesn't really have any elasticity you can see it just breaks but it's okay now we want to let it rest I want to give the proteins and flour time to hydrate this will help us develop the correct amount of gluten we want.

My butter pieces here are cold, which is important, and I'm going to add them to the mixer. This is the part where it is most useful to have them. the mixer with a dough hook on hand, it's actually the step of adding the butter that's a little harder to do so I'm happy to let the mixer take care of it, a nice slow mix though It is one of the keys to the correct texture of the dough. The dough has been transformed. You can see what a different texture it is. It has been completely absorbed. The butter is much more elastic.

It is a very, very soft and flexible dough and that is what we want. easily spreads and

perfect

ly envelops the butter and here's a great tip so this is something I learned in

cooking

school. I'm going to make a cut in one direction and then a cut in the other direction, basically reorienting the gluten strand so that as it goes up, it expands and then it's easier to shape it into a rectangle, which is the shape we need. for lamination. I'm going to let it sit at room temperature until it's expanded about 50 percent in size, so one and a half times and then let's go. transfer it to the refrigerator and let it cool and finish rising slowly for a few hours, okay butter, now we're going to talk about butter, the flavor of croissants is butter, so that's where you want to look for the highest quality products.

You may find that the recipe calls for European or European-style butter, that designation means there is a higher percentage of butterfat. Butter should have some plasticity, meaning the ability to bend without breaking or breaking. Kerrygold has that even when it's cold and as we go deeper. the lamination, I'll explain why it's really important, I'm just going to loosely fold the parchment paper and I have this kind of loose package and I'm going to use my rolling pin to lightly beat the butter that I don't want to like to soften it without heating it and make it pliable.

I can't imagine my neighbors would love hearing this noise day after day, but I would at least bring them croissants the next day, so this part is a little noisy and now I want to focus on getting very clean straight sides and I'm making a block of Very level butter somewhere around an 8 inch square, a little larger is fine. I would say that there are a surprising number of recipes where I ask for a ruler and No, I'm not trying to bother you or like, the reason I ask for the recipe is because I think that if you use it, it will make your life easier in the future, as if it were a gift, you can see it.

I folded the parchment into a square, the butter is smaller than the parchment and I'm going to beat it again to fill all those spaces and at a certain point you'll be able to roll it without beating it, so I'm just going to move in a rotating motion and force the butter into any place inside the square where there is an air space that you can see letting it harden in the refrigerator while the trench finishes rising. I have an exchange, it's over. It rises in the refrigerator and now it's cold and it's basically doubled in size, so I'm going to show you what it looks like.

You can see how the dough has expanded and those four points have become almost like corners now, so that's going to do it. It's easier to shape it into a rectangular shape and there's only one quick intermediate step I want to do before I move on to lamination and that's to put this in the freezer. The fillets rise more when we add the butter. We have to control the fermentation. of the dough and that just means that it becomes very important to control the temperature and keep the dough very, very cold so that the yeast stays very slow and calm and doesn't produce gases that will make it much more difficult to roll.

If anyone has a great replacement at home for plastic wrap for this purpose, please let me know. I'm actually going to use a similar technique to what I used for the butter. Right now, I'm not worried. about the thickness or dimensions, I just want it to be even, I don't want to freeze it, that won't help me when I want to roll it out, I just want it to be super cold and firm, so they should last about 20 minutes. Okay, okay, so the next stage is to block the butter so that it wraps the butter in the dough and then I'll roll it out and make the folds for the lamination.

The important thing here is my dough and my butter. They have a similar texture and that will help the butter spread evenly within the dough and for them to have the same texture I need the dough to be colder than the butter, which is why we generally had it in the freezer. To get through all the rolling steps without adding a lot of excess flour, so I'll roll out my dough or flatten it into a slab that's basically the same width as the butter block, but twice as long as you're trying to keep it. As long as your square sides I keep running my hands underneath just to make sure it doesn't really stick, you can also give it a spin.

We are looking for butter that can be bent but not broken. I'm going to place it. the center of my dough and close the butter into the dough by folding the longer sides into the center of the butter. You can pull as much as you need to even out the thickness of the dough. They do not need to overlap. you just need them to come together so you can see that I have an even thickness of dough on all sides and now I'm going to pinch the sides just to keep the butter from peeking through. Now I've blocked the butter and I'm going to spread it out and do my first twist.

I rotated the dough 90 degrees so that the seam running down the center of the butter block is now vertical. I'm going to churn the dough to start lengthening the slab and also thinning it out. I have found that creaming the butter and paying special attention to the sides will help keep the sides straight and parallel, so lift it periodically to make sure nothing is sticking. Now I'm going to go in with my rolling pin and start rolling and I'm going to make a very long narrow slab about two feet long, the length is not as important as the thickness.

I'm going to use about a half to a quarter of an inch thick. I'm not pressing down, if you press down you risk squeezing. Take out the butter and fuse the dough together, you know, then you won't have that definition of layers, so it's actually kind of a pushing motion outward and towards you, so this is actually called a double twist, we're going to fold the mass. dough in a way that quadruples the number of layers right now I have dough butter dough but when we fold it we multiply the layers of butter between the dough and that is what gives us the flakiness, we fold one end of the dough towards the middle line and take the other side of the dough and fold it down and now I'm going to fold everything in half crosswise and this is now called a book so you can see I now have a piece of dough that's four thicknesses, one, two, three . four, I have now quadrupled the number of layers in my slab, this is called first turning and each time we spread and fold it, those layers become thinner and multiply at this stage, the butter is now heating up and so is the dough It's getting hot. and we've also worked the dough, so you're going to want to jump back when you go to roll it out, so we want to chill it before we do another turn, maybe a little bit of rolling out because the thinner it is, the faster.

It will cool, I reserve the plastic for before you can see that it has hardened quite a bit, so I'm going to spread it out and we're going to do the next turn, the second and last one, which is called a simple turn. so it's a slightly different orientation than the first hit with the rolling pin, it just starts that elongation process, so you may have little air bubbles, which is normal, partly due to fermentation and partly just because maybe you had some. Air pockets between the dough and the butter, you can go ahead and pop them like dusting them with flour and then wiping off the excess.

I'm talking a lot, but this time you also want to try to go faster than me. We're doing what's called a simple twist where I fold it into thirds like a letter, so this is a little bit simpler method. You can see that my ends have rounded out a bit, which is a very common problem. I'm just pulling on the ends of the slab to try to square them, so this is your second turn, a simple twist and the last turn take advantage of the tension against the plastic wrap and use your rolling pin to force it into a square. stick again and to create sharper corners, the dough has been cooling, so it has rested and now the last step of the first day of the croissant process is to roll out the dough into a slab, as a previous step to shaping it, it is prepare it.

To roll and form croissants tomorrow you'll want to go back try rolling in the other direction so roll perpendicular to the direction you were going and it should spread out that way the dough is starting to resist a little bit. This is a good It's time to wrap it again, put it back in the refrigerator and tomorrow, when it's nice and rested, we can roll it out if necessary until it's the right dimensions and we're going to cut out the roll test and bake our croissants. I told you it was a process I know it's a lot but it's worth it we made the dough we let it rise we added the butter we spread it we made the first round the second round and then we left it overnight we are entering the really exciting part in which We are nearing the end of the process, so we want to create an ideal testing environment for croissants.

This is a really important part of the process because it is what will determine how light, airy and flaky your pastries will be.croissants, so I'm going to use our oven to create an enclosed area for fermentation. I have a pan of water right here. I want this to simmer and I'm going to place it in the oven, which is our fermentation area, while the water will cool down a little from the croissants and all that steam will make it ideally moist. The atmosphere gets very nervous because this part, I'm nervous, I'm excited, let me go grab the dough, so I'm going to give this dough a little bit of flour, I mean the bare minimum, if you see air bubbles, go ahead and just pop them, be careful.

When you move the dough so as not to puncture any of the layers, I'm ready to start cutting, so the first thing I want to do is straighten out the shorter sides because I want uniform sized croissants. I'm measuring and then making small. marks with my cutter and now I'm just going to use my ruler and connect those marks on the two longest sides and cut this into four even rectangles, these will be cut into eight triangles and each triangle will be a half moon, what is it? the word for a right triangle the right triangle is like this, what if that's what it's called?

Well, now I have right triangles. I want to turn them into isosceles triangles, so anyone who thinks trigonometry doesn't help you later in life, just think about making croissants. Sort of like an eyeball, if you end up cutting like a tiny little triangle out of the base, you don't really have to do this, but I think it helps form more uniform crescents and also exposes some of the layers in the base, which I like. how it looks in the final crescent, I like to give it a gentle tug along the short side, also a little tug to elongate it almost like a witch's hat, like a little bit wider face, a long tapered tip to that you don't want large spaces by no means, but you also don't want to stress the dough and create a lot of tension, so I let it rest on the tip of the triangle and sometimes I give it a little like a little bop like that because I want that point to stick and rest on the point, it will stick right on the baking sheet right there and poured back into a pan, these will get very large so I want to loosen the plastic because they will become extremely puffy as they rise and I don't want them to find resistance against the plastic.

I tried freezing them, but you can certainly do anything up to this step. Put the baking sheets in the freezer. You can even put them all on one tray. Freeze them. solid, take them out, put them in your test setup like we did and let them grow when I tested it that way. It took me seven hours to fully proof and the ones I froze were like one of the best batches I ever made. I'm looking at around two to two and a half hours, so I'll check them out to see how they're doing and then we'll talk about how to tell when your croissants are approved smiling because I'm so excited.

I've been testing what it was like it's been a good time three hours two and a half hours well then two and a half hours so at the long end of the range these are tested to me they remind me of the Michelin men, they seem The tools have been inflated a bit you have to determine if they are fermented enough. They're basically all visual because we don't want to touch them. They are super delicate while the oven preheats. I'm going to discover them. and actually place the trays in the refrigerator. Firstly, it will slow down the fermentation so they don't over-ferment while the oven preheats, and secondly, they will harden in the refrigerator, making it easier to carefully apply a beaten egg. uncover them carefully because you don't want to disturb any of the layers and as I uncover them I can show you how there is a little wobble to these guys when I gently shake the pan which is an indication that there is a lot of gas in these and they are fermented we want a beautiful exterior burnished and shiny, the best way to achieve this is to brush it with a mixture of egg yolk and heavy cream, basically half an egg shell is a tablespoon, this gives it golden color and baked shine. preheated now let's apply the beaten egg you don't want to prick the croissants at all they are so puffy and light they are also about to collapse I don't want to cover the exposed layers with egg because the egg could fuse them together and prevent this type of separation from happening , so I'm just going to cover the smooth top surfaces of the croissant with beaten egg, I think of charlotte's web, where towards the end where wilbur is taken to the county fair and the farmer's wives base meant buttermilk, it's Just what this makes me think about.

When I was a kid, that image really stuck with me, someone told me to stop worrying about them, thank you, thank you, sometimes I need to hear that, okay? Let's go to the oven, thank you. Okay, be nice, be nice and now don't touch them. Nobody else just wants to sit in front of this all the time and watch them. Oh my goodness it smells so good if they could pump this out. It smells like every open house with every house on the market, ever a big increase in home sales is that things like the cookie challenge when people try to buy your house or whatever, oh, that's my stopwatch, I'm going to rotate each tray 180 degrees. so that what is in the front of the oven will go to the back, I am also going to change the racks, so what is on the top will go on the bottom, from bottom to top, this is just to have all the croissants They brown evenly Troubleshooting Croissants Many times you don't know when something has gone wrong in the process until you bake it, so one thing that commonly happens is that butter leaks out of the croissants and pools on the baking sheet. during baking. that your croissants got too hot during proofing and the butter just melted, the other thing is that your dough might not be rested very well, that's another reason I like to leave the slab overnight, usually one that is flat but wide like a footprint big but flat means you overprotected them, they just don't grow very much, so you certainly underprotected them, you don't have this kind of webbed interior, that's the sign that the butter probably got too soft while you were rolling.

There are a lot of things here that are very technical and delicate throughout the process, but they will taste great no matter what, so I prefer a well-made croissant or biancui, which I think are nothing like this pale one. It's too tall to take this off, I'm sorry, I think it's okay, here they are, let them cool on the baking sheets and then we're definitely going to cut them up and see this one looks great, you can see the spiral, it's not huge. air spaces that make me happy and I have a kind of honeycomb, so I am very happy with this.

I think it's a great result for people at home. There are a few baked goods that come to mind that are as successful as many. texture notes like a croissant and it's this miraculous combination of extremely rich and very light plus this very toasted and shattered exterior, like to me, it's hard to think of a higher pastry achievement than a croissant, so once you know everything The method and process for making the croissant allows you to make many different variations of the classic crescent, so I will show you how to make a ham and cheese version and a chocolate pano version or chocolate croissant and we are using exactly the same dough, the slab is rolled into slightly different dimensions and I'll show you how to cut them and shape them and then they are proofed in the same way as croissants, which is why they are called tongs or batone.

They are designed especially for penalty chocolate, so I have specially ordered them, they are really not something you can normally find in any type of supermarket or even a specialty food store. If you don't want to order them, you can go ahead and use chocolate bars that we can cut into similar pieces. large size bars, these bars broke when I was carrying them here, but that's okay, I'm just going to cut them crosswise and I think it's actually easier if you score them right, so with the score and break method, to me, it breaks less. that way because obviously chocolate is brittle and will want to break into different pieces, these are a little bit smaller so we're going to cut 10 instead of eight, these are the dimensions I want.

I'm going to mark three inch widths, okay? It was weirdly hard but I got it, I'm going to lengthen it a little bit, I'm going to place it about a half to an inch from one of the short ends, then we're going to wrap the dough around the chocolate bar and then right where you have This seam you're going to fit it into another bar. of chocolate and you'll keep rolling, make sure the chocolate is completely inside the dough and then see how pretty it is. I'm going to lay another slab exactly the same way and show you how. to roll the ham and cheese, you can really use any type of thinly sliced ​​ham from any grocery store, like the deli aisle, already packaged, that's totally fine, this is an emmental, you can use swiss cheese, you can use Gruyere, perfect, I want to make sure.

I'm using something about a half ounce. Wow, I'm nailing it with these amounts and then leaving a little edge along the short end so you can get the spiral going and then just fold them over. You're a little chubbier than the chocolate guy there you go, so there are all kinds of things you can do with steel croissants to revive them and bring them back and one of my favorite things is to make all my croissants, it's amazing. They come together pretty quickly, I'm going to toast it, so usually a frangipane doesn't require this step, but I think it adds a lot of flavor, you don't have to make it light and fluffy like you would if you were making a cake, that's just not necessary, we want it mixed well, you get that really intense almond flavor from the extract that actually almost um, I don't know how to describe it.

I'm going to make my rum with simple syrup. The simple syrup contains equal parts water and sugar, take it off the heat, I'm going to add two tablespoons of dark rum and then I have eight very aged ones, I baked them a couple of days ago, croissants, they're a little sad, this batch I overprotected them to As you can see they are very flat I am cutting them in half as if I were going to make a sandwich the first thing we are going to do is soak the cut sides of all the halves with the syrup when products like this are rancid they are losing a lot of the moisture, so we're replacing some of that moisture that's been lost and I'm going to take half of this mixture and divide it evenly between the bottom eight halves of the croissants, spread the pan over the entire surface to the edges. the lids go back up like this, yeah, the second half of the feather stripe goes across the top, you can see, that's why I didn't mount them on the baking sheets because I have crazy crumbs and everything, and those crumbs They would burn, oh God, it's okay.

I love them, I feel like a baking fairy godmother and I'm here to say that you can make this at home. I have never made so many croissants in a 24 hour period as I feel so good about it all, so here is my ham. and cheese, I don't know, I don't really use this word, but they are kind of transcendent, really, I don't know, it's hard to even describe them as that good, they look like they could come from a bakery, silky, that's like the word for me. That comes to mind as being so good that it seems like a scant amount of chocolate, but chocolate has a very, very strong flavor so I don't think it will end up being too little chocolate, maybe this is my favorite now.

I don't know if there's anything that comes close to a freshly baked croissant, it's a twice baked croissant. It's amazing to take something that's already so delicious, the plain butter croissant, and then be able to transform it into pastries of this variety, as one is more delicious and the next is amazing, it's something you can make and try to perfect for the rest of your life. life and along the way you'll eat like a million delicious croissants and that sounds like an amazing project, I just think I'm like I don't know. I keep looking down and get a little lost in thought because this is still overwhelming.

This swirl is hypnotizing. I am captivated. I hope that if you try this at home you will be too. captivated by the process that for me is nothing short of a miracle baking is a miracle oh my god I need to sit down and drink this coffee.