Croissant improvement | The Fresh Loaf

Oh snap! Massive write up on this bake and poof ! its gone. Just wrote tons of notes on how this particular bake resulted in a more open structure and really delicate crumb and then after submit, no message body. Maybe later I can recall the details - suffice to say that a lot was learned on this bake and pretty happy with results and, just wanted to share some of the experience with other TFLers especially since croissant crumb development seems to be a recurring area of interest. Total bummer, ok, more later ...

that has happened to me too! I didn't redo that post though. hope you feel like giving it another go......

Leslie

Is bittersweet, we get all crazed at a few lost paragraphs but in the big picture can do all sorts of amazing things that were impossible 30 years ago. Yes so i lost about 10 minutes of writing - mostly explaining what worked here amd especially considering that open crumb croissants is kind of tricky. In this case I used a new flour that turned out to be underwhelming for bread - this is Francine Bio T55 - as i more closely inspected the labelling I found that it contained zero additives (no malt, no acids, no amylases) and as such produced a really boring flavored loaf. It mixed beautifully however and furthermore i noticed that they recommended this for brioche and pastries - the resulting croissants were incredibly delicate and separated quite well. I did mess up on the final folding having chilled for too long causing the butter to break in places whoch could be seen as lumps under the surface and this always seems to be the lamination step that causes me the most grief. Either I roll out too late and butter now too soft, or too late and the butter is too firm. What did seem to help a lot however is doing the final proof as a longer and cooler stretch - thisbtime bybdesign as in the past I have seen the butter warm up too much an bleed into the layers. I have seen videos of bakers performing both the double and simple folds in one quick step that is, they dont chill between folds. There really only seema to be about a 5-10 minute window that both butter and dough are at compatible levels of malleability. More than anything and despite havong some lamination hiccups I can definitely see that a cooler and longer final proof seems to help with layer separation. Another difference was omitting milk and eggs in the dough as some recipes suggest building a more brioche style dough, in this case I went with flour, water, yeast, salt, butter and sugar thus creating a more distinct difference in lower fat content dough and high fat layers of butter. So in all these two differences resulted in better separation. The one thing I cannot figure out is how this flour produced such boring bread but at the same time such tasty croissants, they really,are,wuite strikingly tasty. So out of the two bakes this weekend, canele and vienoise, the second was much more favorably recieved as the croissant and pain au chocolate are now ling gone and consumed meanwhile our little canele batch has a few sad left-overs begfing to be eaten :(

When I went back to school for my second (but real) career as a computer programmer, the industry was in the throes of finishing the conversion from Hollerith punch cards to CRT and keyboard entry. In our computer lab at school we had rows of tables where as many as maybe 40 students at a time could sit and enter their lines of code for our assignments.

The front end of the system was occasionally buggy and would drop out every so often. Without doing a "save" whatever work was entered would be lost. Sooner or later just about everyone there, including yours truly, became a victim. Particularly noteworthy was the guy who, upon a system drop, yelled out "I just lost 500 lines!". I learned right then and there to always do intermittent "saves" to my work. A rule that I still follow to this day even though I've been retired for 14 years.

Sorry to read about getting bitten, but it happened and still happens to the best of us.

Yep computer programmer .. Is it just me or there a lot of geeks who turn to baking for brain therapy ? As they say, the butcher's dog is the worst fed dog in town and in a like manner my own posts suffer from lack-of-save-intermttent-save-syndrome! Back to grind and more fun c#, sql and javascripting ...

On my Windows desktop, I use Firefox browser plus a brilliant addon called Form History Control.

It's a great extension that takes frequent snap shots of text box entries. It's been a real life saver for me many times when you get that dreaded empty box after you've clicked the OK button!

Lance

be it about baking or computing....

edit: the croissants look pretty good to me, funny that you should get such a different flavour profile between the bread and the croissants.

Interesting about firefox, I have it as an alternative but haven't used it for a few years. will look into that too.

keep smiling, and happy baking therapy everyone

Leslie

I write all of my blog entry original posts in Open Office. It does frequent automatic saves. When the text part is complete and my photos are all edited, I create my new blog entry, copy and paste the text into TFL, upload and insert the photos, preview and save.

I have experienced the woeful loss of my stellar prose, created in TFL, more than once. Hence my current routine.

Nice croissants!

David

now is demonstrating his mastery over the evil buttery beasts called croissants. Sheesh - you're gonna run out of challenges soon!

Seriously - these look amazing, and I'm quite sad that the interwebs ate your write-up, since I'm sure that it would have been one of those perfectly detailed explanations that I bookmark to read over and over again! It really is typical, though, that any professional will get "caught" at home neglecting some basic thing that they do at work all day ;)

Ah well - it just means that you'll have to replicate the bake (and replicate the flavour from a bland flour) and detail it all out for us again.

Nice bake - looking forward to your next challenge!

Again with any baking challenge i get a bit Ocd but thats one of the rare benefits of being really wacko and clinical ocd sufferer - before i joined tfl i did short crust pies and pizza religously so most excitong thing is i think I found a flour i really like - each item usually starts with flour choice and the francine bio is really fantastic (super delicate). It should be fun to see how vienoisse style works out - plenty more to come im sure !