Croissants--not for the faint of heart

K and I baked croissants on Sunday night. I use the term "baked" loosely, because one does not simply bake croissants in one night from scratch. No. It takes about 24 hours from start to finish*.

What I actually mean then, is that I showed K how to make the croissant dough, did a "turn" for her, and plopped myself on her futon to sleep at 2:30am. 

Because I have so much time on my hands this Spring Break week, I decided to make a batch myself. I haven't mustered up the willpower to make croissants since last summer because they are so darned time-consuming. If you'd like the recipe, send me an email and be prepared to toil.

Start: Tuesday 8:00pm
Eat: Thursday 10:00am

If you don't like delayed gratification, this recipe isn't for you. Feel free to pick up instant pudding cups at your local Safeway. For the rest of you, feast your eyes.

Dough ready to be rolled out. Look at those layers!

Fast forward to the fun part: this is the dough after 3 "turns" with 2-hour rests in between. A turn is basically when you pound out a yeast dough-wrapped butter square, tri-fold it both ways, and roll it out again after refrigerating it for two hours. The refrigerating is to keep the butter cold, so it forms lots of flaky layers. It's a real arm workout. One also makes puff pastry with a similar technique, with the only difference being that the croissant dough will mischievously expand into a fluffy pillow when your back is turned. That's because croissant dough is yeasted, but puff pastry dough is not.


I won't belabor the dough-making process to you non-bakers out there, but in case you wanted to know, I, too, panicked the first time I made croissants. And that's because the butter is supposed to go from whole-stick form to being paper-thin, all without melting! Just a word of advice: keep pounding, folding, and rolling until the dough is nice and elastic, with no noticeable chunks of butter. It'll happen eventually, unless you have unusually warm hands. Lucky for me (and to D's chagrin) my hands are always ice-cold.

It's not easy rolling things into rectangles.

Everything is better with dark chocolate

I love chocolate croissants, and was oh so disappointed when La Note ran out of them during brunch with some girlfriends. But the beauty of being versed in baking is that I can make whatever I want! (Take that, La Note!) So in go the dark chocolate chips, and voila!--chocolate croissants. Any chocolate chips would do, except for white chocolate. That'd probably taste weird. White chocolate also has a lower melting temperature, so it might get burned in the baking process. This is all speculation though; if you insist, I won't stop you.  On a related note, if I were ever to cater a party, I'd make a miniature assortment of croissants--ham and cheddar, sauteed artichoke and chicken, spinach and mushroom, chocolate, of course...mmm...Moving along.

All rolled up. How cute! Don't let its skinny shape fool you.

 I also made some plain croissants that are, erm, slightly healthier than the chocolate variety, for my parents. After rolling the rough into a rectangle, simply cut into two triangles and roll them up. Tuck in the little point so that it doesn't burn during baking. Eating the little tail first was my favorite part as a kid. I was weird.

Chocolate wants to get in on the action

Portioning out the dough isn't an exact science--my ruler never touches these. But it turns out that I make them a bit smaller than the recipe calls for, yielding about 35 croissants. If I wanted to eat a humungous croissant, I could just buy them at Costco for $5.99 a dozen, with hardly any of the heavy lifting. By my estimate, $5.99 can make you several dozen of these croissants. I can't calculate the cost of your labor, though.

20 hours into the baking process

The formed croissants are now left to rise for another 10-16 hours in the refrigerator. I let them rise overnight so I had breakfast baking to look forward to. If you're the Saves-For-a-Rainy-Day type like me, you can freeze some at this point. Just put the tray in the freezer, and pop them into a ziploc freezer bag when they are frozen to retain their shape.


Okay this next part is going to shock and disgust you. And that is, the egg wash. That's right. You beat a whole egg and then sparingly brush the gloppy yellow stuff onto your beautifully formed croissants right before you bake it. Gross. Oh, that's not gross to you? Eating eggs is normal, you say? Okay, it's just me then.


But guess what? It comes out looking like this:

Get into my belly

Those pale skinny logs of dough flatten out nicely into bronzed cylinders of flakiness when they hit a 400-degree oven. At first you'll be weirded out that you can create--from scratch--croissants that smell just like the ones you've been eating your entire life. And then you'll shout from the rooftops that they taste much, much better.
*And then you'll want to take a break from croissant-making indefinitely because I said that they would be done in 24 hours, when actually you've been working on them for three days. Oops.

This one unrolled, whoops! But see the layers?

Croissants are best eaten still warm from the oven. This makes sharing with my friends somewhat difficult, since many of them aren't in the area. But with some careful coordination and patience, anything can happen.