Hello!
Does anyone have experience making croissants with Straus butter (85% butter fat)?
I’ve been having terrible luck with Kerrygold where I got to the point of working with astronomical precision - measuring out all the temperatures with an IR thermometer (roll in at 13C butter, 6C dough, second roll at 13C and then roll out <10C), adhering to timing, rolling with focus on pushing out not down, etc - and I get beautiful lamination, but inside the baked croissant it’s a soggy, greasy brioche roll, disgusting. So this week I tried making three batches with Straus butter and despite the lamination being terrible I got lofty, light croissants that I can actually eat. The problem I have with it though is that no matter what temperature I try for the butter block it shatters every time - 13C, 14-15C, 18-19C. My kitchen is around 19C in the morning when I do the lamination, so it would be hard to get the butter warmer than that, but it already feels soft at 18-19C temperature and yet still shatters, or more like crumbles upon roll in. I got more or less decent lamination on the third attempt because after it all broke up into pieces on roll in I ended up opening the dough and basically spreading the butter across the dough with a butter knife… though then it still cracked in one place. I also did all the folds (one double, one single) straight away as I did not dare put that thing in the fridge. For the final roll out I did rest it in the fridge 20 min or so and had no problem.
So is there any temperature when this Straus butter wouldn’t shatter to pieces on the initial roll in? They do taste wonderful with Straus butter, and I also found that the dough is much more forgiving to work with, so I’d love to get it to work better, but could it be that the fat content is just too high? Or maybe the way this particular butter is made prevents it from being pliable?
I should note that when I switched to Straus I also switched my yeast from active dry (which I’ve been using exclusively previously) to instant dry. Could it be that the yeast make such a big difference and not the butter? I did have random success before with active dry yeast that I couldn’t ever reproduce, but I can’t remember if I was using Kerrygold or Plugra in that batch, this was early on in my croissant journey and those were the two butters I was trying initially. So I’m tempted to think it’s the butter that makes the difference, but I don’t really know. For my formula I use slight variations going between Hamelman and Buttermilk pantry recipes, but more lately leaning towards a lower hydration (54.4%) dough with 50:50 milk:water and no butter in it. 140g roll in butter for a recipe with 250g King Arthur bread flour. Straus butter croissant, more or less reproducible:
Oven too warm?
From the color it seems like your oven temp is high. Try Kerrygold again but with lower oven temp/longer cooking time. What is the fat % on Kerrygold?
I've tried 400F for 7 min then 350F for 15-18 min, as well as 375F for 25-30 min. The latest Straus batch was at 410F for 7 min and 355F for 13 min, and they certainly cooked faster than the brioche-type Kerrygold batches, which makes sense. I don't think the oven is too hot, these temperatures are pretty standard guidance.
Who knows what the butterfat % is on Kerrygold, they don't put it on the packaging as far as I remember (don't have it in front of me). But online research points to 82% fat.
My question is more around the plasticity of Straus butter though, or butter with 85% butterfat. Is it supposed to be crumbly at cool room temperature? Do I need to get it warmer than 19C? I thought the whole point of higher fat butter is that it's more plastic at cooler temperatures, but this is clearly not the case with Straus. I do have to give it though, that it is has such low affinity for the dough that it doesn't readily mix with it even at these relatively higher temperatures.
Sounds like butter is breaking into bits as you roll it out? So when you create your butter slab, you’re giving it a gentle pounding, yes? Have you checked your refrigerator temp recently? Maybe your temp is a bit colder than 3 C (37 F)? Honestly, I generally use generic American butter and only occasionally have had it disintegrate. I use active dry yeast and pâte fermentée.
Here’s my process. I mix my dough and refrigerate after a very brief counter rest. Then I create my butter slab and refrigerate it for .5-2 hours. Next I enclose the butter and do a book fold. Back in the fridge for 2-ish hours. Letter fold and fridge overnight. Next day dough on counter for .5-1 hour (my kitchen tends to cool 16-17 dC). Tap dough with rolling pin. Roll out and shape. I used to bake at 220 C (425 F) but had a lot of butter leakage. Now things are working much better at 190 C (375 F) for 15, then 175 (350 F) for 10-15. I will often scale the recipe for 2-3 dozen and bake batches on several successive days. Seems to work great for me.
Sorry I can’t help specifically with Straus butter.
Bonne chance,
Phil
Thank you for the guidance on your process!
Yes, the butter is breaking into bits. Kind of like crumbles even. I think the refrigerator temperature is irrelevant as I'm using an IR thermometer to bring everything to desired temperature. Hopefully that thing is accurate... I never roll in my butter block straight out of the fridge.
You might want to try a technique that is fairly common when making unyeasted puff pastry. The butter is smeared out with a scraper or the heel of your hand while incorporating a small amount of flour into the butter. I think Julia describes this in volume 2 of Mastering. I use 30 g of flour to 250 g of butter in my classic pâte feuilletée. You could scale to whatever quantity of butter you are using. This process seems to make the butter more malleable but you still need to manage temperature carefully.
And just out of curiosity, have you checked the IR thermometer calibration? In addition, I would be wary of surface temperature measurements. A probe thermometer into the center of the dough mass might tend to give you a very different reading even after post-refrigeration rest. I typically refrigerate my dough after a book or letter fold which leaves the mass 4-5 cm thick…
Keep on keepin’ on,
Phil
Maybe I'll have to try adding flour to the butter block, that might help. Haven't properly checked the IR thermometer, but the quick check that I did (can't remember, ice cubes or something) seemed to check out. It does say +/- 2C on the packaging, so it can be a few degrees off.
Thanks again for the tips!
ADY contains less viable yeast per gram than IDY. The standard conversion is 2/3:1 IDY to ADY. So if you are using the same amount and did not convert, then yes, IDY can make a difference.
Regarding butter: You can get good results using any American butter. In my bakery we use standard butter from Sysco or Sam's Club. We make tens of thousands of croissants with fabulous results.
That being said, yes, higher butterfat butters should be more pliable at cooler temps. Some butters are processed differently though: for example, sheet butter (beurre de tourage) is processed in such a way that gives it a much higher melting point (like 90+ degrees) and the molecules don't crystallize, so it is very malleable. I have actually found this kind of butter harder to use, as my croissants rose differently and the texture was not what I was used to.
I also found the recommended baking temps were much too hot. I bake at 350 always and get good results.
In summary, keep practicing as you can get good results with any butter. At a glance I would say to proof longer at a cooler temperature. I proof croissants at about 75º for 4-6 hours.
No, I didn't do the yeast conversion, so that might be a factor. But the Buttermilk Pantry recipe (and someone else on this forum) claims to be using active dry yeast and even less of it than the instant yeast guidance from Hamelman and others. So it just feels like it's all over the place. Though most recipes go with instant yeast at high dose.
You probably have a dough sheeter at the bakery? I'm just rolling by hand. I understand a dough sheeter is much more capable of dealing with various butters.
That's an interesting note about butter being processed differently! Do you know where I can read more about it? (Just out of curiosity, I doubt it would be of direct help to my croissant making). I did notice that the Anchor butter sheets are "just" 83% fat but claim to have all kinds of useful properties that I haven't noticed in conventional butter, ha! Well that explains it. Too bad I can't get my hands on one of those.
I do have a sheeter, but originally I did everything by hand. The sheeter allows me to do 5x the batch size which of course is nice. I had no issue with hand rolling standard butter. It's a matter of practice, sometimes a matter of the rolling pin. However you have said you can get good looking lamination, which indicates from my experience that the issue is not the lamination but the proofing.
You are right in your comment that "it just feels like it's all over the place". I use an extremely low quantity of yeast by any standard. I learned, though it was frustrating to not be able to trust books, that I needed to bake them differently than called for and proof them differently than called for. They need enough time to rise to a bloated, jiggly, puffy state, and it needs to be cool enough for the butter to not melt while doing so. I noticed that in my sample batches using tourage butter, the proofing time had to be extended by quite a bit. I've no idea why.
My short-form advice is to push proofing time. I've lost a pan before and proofed it double, and it was HUGE but the results were great (not overproofed in quality).
I don't have any lengthy reading about the butter processing; I read it in an ad for Beurremont sheet butter. But I believe you can purchase Anchor butter by the kilogram at webstaurant store. Keep in mind that you don't need as much per batch (75% maybe). I don't understand why that works out but it does. Good luck!
I did look into getting the butter sheets, but even on these restaurant supply websites they are being sold by the case - that's 44 lb of butter for something like $300. There's nowhere for me to store this, let alone being able to use so much butter... would last me forever.
I did some searching online and found some handbooks for butter production. The commercial process is way more complicated than I had ever imagined, with many stages. There's a step for crystallizing the butter, and I bet that's where it could be made more plastic (though I haven't read all the details and don't have a definitive answer yet).
Any progress on using that kerrygold butter? I do want to confirm I did have success with it once. Trying to recreate this, and update if anything