February 9, 2015
Rob
9

Recipe: Croissant dough

Croissants are simply one of those things you don’t make at home.
Cakes, you can make. A pastry cream, you can make. But who wants to make all the effort to make a laminated yeast dough?

Me, of course. The croissant dough is one of the fundamental pastry doughs, together with brioches, milk bread and Danish.

croissant-dough-shaped

Croissants are the symbol of traditional (French) pastry: being able to bake them at home is for me an enormous achievement (even though the dough is far from impossible to make and my result far from perfect).

This dough is mainly used for croissants and pains au chocolat and its procedure derives from puff pastry, with the addition of yeast.

So how to make croissant dough?

Recipe-Croissant-dough-Step10

This dough is laminated: this means that it is made of a kneaded détrempe (basically flour, water and yeast plus sugar, salt and milk powder) and then a layer of butter is incorporated before “folding” multiple times.

The dough contains a high percentage of butter: folding this dough multiple times will create many layers of dough and butter. In order to keep all the layers well separated even after rolling the dough out multiple times, we need strong gluten strands in the détrempe and therefore a high-gluten flour is recommended.

Recipe-Croissant-dough-Step15

Nevertheless, using a high-gluten flour can result in an over-elastic dough which is hard to roll out, so make sure not to over-knead it.

Note: strong flours have a high “W”, a technical parameter which is usually never mentioned in supermarket flours: as a rule of thumb, you can opt for a high-protein flour, or bread flour, or, best of all, the so-called “Manitoba” flour (“farine de gruau” in French).

What are the steps to make croissant dough?

The procedure to make croissants is the following:

croissant dough steps-process

  1. Knead the détrempe (with yeast)
  2. Ferment the dough: either until doubled in size (~1 hour) at room temperature or for longer times (best overnight) in the fridge
  3. Fold in butter
  4. First lamination: folding the dough in 3
  5. Second lamination: folding the dough in 4

Preparing the final products will also require proofing (as it happens in all yeast doughs), but that’s another story! The first step is always the dough: so let’s get down to work…

 

Croissant dough

Print recipe

Ingredients

Détrempe

500gManitoba flour (or 350g pastry flour + 150g bread flour)
60gGranulated sugar
10gWhole milk powder
12gSalt (~2 teaspoons)
100gUnsalted butter (room temperature)
25gFresh yeast
230gCold water (at around 16°)

Folding

250gUnsalted butter

Directions

1
Place the sifted flour in the bowl of a mixer and add the fresh crumbled yeast in a hole in the middle.
Next add the sugar, salt and butter, each far away from the others and from the centre.
2
Start mixing at low speed with the hook attachment and add the water progressively
3
Stop mixing after around 6 minutes, when the dough sticks together and cleans the sides of the bowl (don't overknead otherwise it will be hard to roll it out, so do not worry too much if the dough is not perfectly smooth)
4
Lay the dough down on a work surface and flatten it in the shape of a rectangle
5
Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or better overnight
6
Place the folding butter at the centre of a large sheet of parchment paper
7
Fold one side the parchment paper over the butter
8
Unleash your violence and smash the butter with a rolling pin...
9
...until you obtain a nice and flat 7mm-high rectangle (you can easily shape it by folding the paper as soon as the butter starts "expanding" too much)
10
Roll out the cold dough vertically to 7mm high on a lightly floured work surface (try to keep sharp edges)
11
Place the flattened butter on the bottom half of the rolled out dough (the butter and the dough should have a similar consistency; consider re-chilling the butter before using it)
12
Fold the remaining part of the dough over the butter. Press the edges with your fingers to make sure that the dough fully contains the butter.
13
Turn the dough 90° counterclockwise (so that the fold is on your left and the sealed edges are at the top, right and bottom) and quickly press the rolling pin horizontally in different spots of the dough to start flattening without damaging the layer of butter
14
Once the dough has started to become longer vertically, finish rolling it out vertically with wider movements like in step 10 to 6mm high (remember to always work in the same direction: back and forth, not sideways)
15
Fold the top third up until it reaches the two thirds of the length of the dough. Brush off the excess flour to prevent the dough from having grey strokes.
16
Finally fold the bottom part up to close the dough. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least one hour.
17
Turn the dough 90° clockwise compared to the position shown in the previous step (so that the fold is again on your left) and roll the dough out again (if it's too cold, follow the directions in step 13 to avoid damaging the layers of butter)
18
Fold the top part down so that it reaches 1/4 of the length...
19
...then fold the bottom part up to match the other edge folded in the previous step (always remember to brush off the excess flour)
20
Fold the bottom part up so to have 4 layers of dough (ideally the dough should be thinner than what shown in the picture). Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least one hour before using.

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