WanyeKest's blog

Took me 4 attempts to get this done! The first one was disaster (underbaked, too many components, cloying sweet, and too rich), the second one I scraped the levain away (I went overboard with extremely low hydration and extremely high osmotic pressure starter, became too proteolytic and had so little leavening power), the third one was portioning issue, and here is the fourth one!

Well hello, bee-cheese!!! Welcome to this season's finale of my viennoiserie trials!🔥🔥

Oh my god. This was the most labor intensive viennoiserie makeup I've ever done. The lamination and make up were 5 hours process, and I rolled once every 20 minutes! hahah! Worth it!

This time I didn't take inspiration from traditional bakes or dishes. I just wanted to showcase local herbs and spice. Funny thing, if not for English translations, I will never associate lemongrass and lime-basil with lemon lol.

This is my very first true sourdough enriched bread ever HAHAHAHA (can't you tell how ecstatic I am? Oh, and not counting my potato loaves). It was a lot of trials and errors with my starter and fermentation schedule. Oh boy, glad I'm finally here.

Cariah Marey has settled on satisfactory ratio. She is 1:1:1:1 bran:skim-milk-powder:water:butter at the moment. Skim milk lends lactose to increase osmotic pressure, while butter is there as ankle weight. She had little tolerance toward butter. Putting butter in the starter allows her to adapt over time, and she already has.

These ones were inspired by two Indonesian bakes, nastar and lapis legit. Nastar is pineapple tarts, from Dutch 'ananas taart'. It's our holiday cookies, enjoyed during Islamic holiday season and also christmas. As for lapis legit, it is Dutch-Indonesian version of baumkuchen. It's basically yolk-only pound cake with distinctive spice mix, baked layer by layer using upper burner. Lapis legit is usually enjoyed during Chinese New Year (I'm not sure why. Everything about Indonesian cuisine is confusing lol).

This is my take on the American classic ham and cheese croissants. I used cheddar and dendeng (Indonesian style beef jerky) as filling. For the colored dough, I used a mixture of paprika, cayenne, and onion powder. As for the glaze, I pan fried shallot, garlic, keffir lime leaves, and Indonesian bay leaves, then to the pan I added light palm sugar (there is darker variety that actually taste better because of added caramel, but the croissants need sweeter light palm sugar to counteract the slight bitterness of the outer red dough since it burns easier), water, pepper, salt, and fish sauce.

So happy by how this batch turned out! I've made above 20 batches of hand-laminated pain Suisse up to this point, and this is my absolute best so far!

This batch was the tidiest pain Suisse dough I've ever worked with. Usually laminating pain Suisse means greasy working table (the stripes leave butter 'fingerprints' on the table). It wasn't as messy.

Change log:

This is my first practice batch for my second viennoiserie product, coconut glazed black rice pain Suisse. It's basically croissant dough, with pattern made out of sliced dough. It's bicolor dough, the second dough is black rice dough. Instead of taking bit of main dough and knead it with rice flour like my previous chocolate croissants, I made a whole new dough, just because I hate kneading lol.

I've been wanting to take Cariah Marey on a test for enriched loaf. I mean what's even the point of making sweet starter if not making true sourdough enriched dough at all?

Her current state is 8:4:2:1 fine bran:water:skim milk powder:sugar. This is 75% hydration no-water-added sweet potato milk loaf. Basically my usual potato loaf, but less hydration (which means less potato puree), to 'test the water' (both metaphorically and literally) before going all in.

Oh boy. Who knew it would take 4 disastrous batches just to put a layer of chocolate dough! lol. The chocolate layer kept tearing during oven spring.

I needed to practice this because I need something gimmicky for pain au chocolat. I want everything to look inviting once I'm ready for career pivot.

There is no word that can describe how happy I am about this batch!

The formula of this batch I derived from Wayne Gisslen's Professional Baking 7th Edition, so I can't tell you the exact formula, except for tweaks that I did: