Today I finally attempted croissants. I started with a recipe a friend gave me, and tweaked it a bit to use all whole wheat flour, and honey instead of sugar. They were a tad bit doughy (underdone) when I was through, but otherwise they turned out really well. I wasn’t able to roll them out quite as thin as they were supposed to be rolled out (I ran out of room; next time I will have to roll them out on the dining room table.), and I think that was the problem in their being a little underdone.
The recipe:
Croissants
Dough
4-1/2 c. freshly-ground pastry (soft wheat) flour
(plus extra for dusting the rolling surface, etc.)
1 Tbsp. instant yeast
1/4 c. honey
1-1/4 tsp. salt
1-2/3 c. whole milk (cold)
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter, softened
Butter Square
24 Tbsp. (3 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1-Tbsp. pieces and kept cold
2 Tbsp. flour
Egg Wash
1 egg, beaten
Mix all dough ingredients together to form a soft dough. Cover the bowl well with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour. Immediately after putting the dough in the refrigerator, begin the butter square. Unwrap the three sticks of butter, cut them into eighths, and sprinkle the flour on top.
Begin squishing them, and knead the butter and dough together until you have one fairly smooth ball of greasy stuff. Spread out a piece of plastic wrap, plop your butter ball in the middle (a bench scraper works nicely to get the whole mess off of your work surface), and pat and squish to form a 7-inch square. Wrap the plastic wrap around it and refrigerate until you’re ready to use it. (This took me about fifteen minutes, leaving about forty-five minutes for it to chill in the refrigerator before the dough was ready. This was plenty of time for it to firm back up.)
When dough has chilled, place it on a well-floured surface. Sprinkle the top with flour, and roll into an 11-inch square. Put the butter square diagonally on top of the dough (so you have a butter diamond on a dough square).
Fold the corners of the dough over the butter so that the sides meet. Pinch dough together firmly to encase the butter square.
Roll this into a 14-inch square, rolling out from the center and sprinkling it or your rolling surface with flour, if necessary, to prevent sticking. Fold the square into thirds, so you have a long, narrow rectangle. Fold it into thirds again the other direction, so you have a small square. Each of these “into-thirds” folds is called a turn; you have now turned the dough 2 times. Wrap it and refrigerate it again for 2 hours.
Repeat the rolling and folding so you have a total of 4 turns, including the earlier ones. Then roll the dough into a 20-inch square. [This is where I didn't roll it out quite large enough.] Cut it in half so you have two long rectangles. Cut each rectangle into thirds. Cut each third diagonally to form two triangles each. A pizza cutter makes this really easy.
Roll from the wide end to the narrow, then curve the ends around to get a crescent shape as you place the croissant on a piece of parchment.
When all of them are on the parchment, brush with the egg wash and let rise for 30-40 minutes. (They don’t rise much.) [I recommend two baking sheets at this point, as mine were a little cramped after baking. Also, I highly recommend baking sheets with rims. Some of the butter melted out of my croissants during baking and ran down to burn on the bottom of the oven, filling my house up with smoke!]
Bake at 400 degrees for about 18 minutes.
For chocolate or raspberry croissants, you can place a scant tablespoon of filling on each croissant before rolling them up. We tried a couple of ours with a few chocolate chips, and they were good. Jam would also work well, I think. The rest of ours we left plain to use as “rolls.”
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