In recent weeks the weather has been getting cooler and the coffee somehow seems to be tasting better! Go figure ? I was reading the latest Gourmet Traveler mag and came across an article on Paris and you guessed it … an article on the humble croissant. It was around 8:30 pm, but I thought what the … I really wanted one of those beautiful pastries … the bakeries were shut so there was only one thing for it … I dug up an old recipe, switched on a late movie and got to it…

Here’s my recipe for an almost fool-proof croissant. This makes about 20 small croissants or you can live it up and make 10 big babies…

600g bakers flour
370ml warm milk
30g yeast
60 g caster sugar
10g salt
300g chilled butter

Method
Dissolve the yeast in the warm milk. Place all the dry ingredients into a bowl or mixer (dough hook) and mix dry for a minute to evenly distribute the dry ingredients. Add the milk & yeat mixture and form a nice dough. At this point I like to work the dough a bit to ensure the gluten in the flour is activated. Put the dough in the fridge for about 20-30 mins

In the meantime roll the butter into a square about 1cm think, wrap it in plastic and put that into the fridge also

Go and make a nice espresso.

Bring out the dough and roll it out into a square about 2cm thick. Place the butter in the middle and then fold the corners of the dough over it from each corner. Now roll it into a rectangle and do the first of three book folds. Just rest it in the fridge for 20 mins between book folds … to keep the butter nice and hard. This makes for better layers and flakey pastry.

Then roll the pastry out into a rectangle and check out this video for how to cut them out … brush them in egg wash and into a 220deg oven for 15 mins… then its time for another espresso!

Tags: making criossants

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 9:48 am and is filed under Sexy Food Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.