November 1, 2009 - 12:33pm
Croissants and Culinary School
I end a period of inactivity with a picture of croissants!
I've been trying to perfect my scaling and shaping of croissants this weekend, its very important, as i have an exam that tests my ability to do that in three days. Enrolled in culinary school for the past month, I've decided to post up a collection of photographs (that will be growing over the next six months) that I am calling my baking and pastry arts portfolio.
Please critique what you see, and advise me about the life in industry I will be embarking on soon!
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I've recently returned from a master class on laminated pastries and I have a couple of things that I try to think about.
First, were the croissants hand rolled or did you use a sheeter? In general, you will not get as good results with hand rolling.
Second, taken in cross section, an ideal croissant has an even honeycombed structure. This can be compromised by uneven layers (often a result of hand rolling), inappropriate protien content in the flour (usually too high), or too high of a proofing temperature.
You might wish to consider this as regards your product.
Hope this is helpful, especially as you have an exam coming up.
Yes. I used a french rolling pin to roll out the dough.
The layers are uneven. As for why that is, my guess would be a combination of excessively gluten development. That was probably due to excessive movements as I rolled out the dough by hand. Theres no way the proof temperature was too high, as i don't have a proof box (and my house is pretty cool).
In recent reincarnations of my croissants i've been getting more and more even layers. I'll have to hope that the dough I rolled out today will have the best layers yet.
Thanks for the feedback,
Gabriel
If you rolled these by hand—then I assume that you were possibly having to lightly dust with flour to keep the pin from sticking? My guess with the visible rolls is that the surface of the dough either had flour on it or had dried out a bit as a result of the time spent rolling by hand.
I used to use a large, handled soft bristle brush (about 3 inches high x 12 inches long) so that I could quickly dust off the surface. In a case where the dough is too dry on the surface before rolling the croissant–a very very light misting of water might help?
Regardless of the technical aspects of this batch, your croissants do look very delicious!
Best of Luck.
Marc
Dry dough never seemed to be a problem for me. The real difficulty was keeping the dough cold enough to work with it. This was especially evident when I was rolling it out after the 3rd turn into the size and thickness for the scaling of the actual dough pieces of the croissants.
It is possible that there was dry crust forming when I put the dough back into the freezer to firm it up more so that it was workable. But that's the only dry-ness I can recall happening with the dough.
Forming the croissants is when temperature is of unmistakable importance.