Tips to Making Croissants (By revealing my mistakes as a first timer)


Honestly, I'm not sure if I would try making this again because making croissants can be labor intensive and it can take a few times to get them to be perfect. Although they look good and tasted good, they turned out be more biscuit-like rather than airy and soft....Hmmm. (My dad loved them because they reminded him of a brand of biscuits he used to eat as a kid--Not exactly the reference I was aiming for. ) I looked at quite a few recipes but mainly relied on one from this source: http://moroccanfood.about.com/od/breadandrice/r/croissant_dough.htm. For some reason, this recipe calls for adding the cut up pieces of butter into the dough mixture whereas other recipes required you to make an entire layer of butter and incorporate it into the dough once it was done. I changed my mind and decided to take out the cut up pieces of butter in my flour (as pictured below) and form a sheet out of it (which I didn't take a picture of).

I just have to be honest. This was the first time I made dough using yeast and I forgot common sense. I should have used a mixer to make the dough properly. Yet, I rushed through it because I had time constraints. For some reason, I forgot I would have to knead the dough and then add the butter. BIG MISTAKE. Because the dough wasn't properly made, it kept sticking to the counter while I was folding in the butter. (Here, I added my yeast mixture to the flour.) 

In order to prevent the dough from sticking to the counter, I added A LOT of flour. It was like a hungry monster; it just would not stop sticking until it ate up as much flour as possible. This thickened the dough and turned it into the perfect pre-biscuit paste. 


And so, I refrigerated my pre-biscuit paste overnight. The next day I folded it again to "wake the dough up" and tried to cut them in the shape of isosceles triangles to best of my ability with my dough scraper.

The one on the bottom right was filled with jam. This turned out to be a bad idea because it came out of the croissant and burned quite a lot.


Pictured below was my best croissant. However, once he was done, he came out a bit raw. Most recipes call for you to leave the croissants in the oven between 15-20 minutes at 400 degrees. Yet I was making biscuit croissants, so that left them pretty under cooked and left me pretty disappointed. I needed an additional 20 minutes!


He looks pretty appetizing here!


It's quite funny how the best tasting one was the one that looked most horried-yes the one that is surrounded by burnt jam. That's because, inside the jam remained its true texture and went well with the biscuit exterior.


I also made a blueberry tart out of the excess dough and it came out delicious!!
 P.S. Don't use baking chocolate to fill your croissants. SMH.

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