Good Morning, well it would have been if I hadn’t been coughing on burning butter smoke!

So yesterday I used my bread machine to make the dough to see how well it came out and it looked so smooth and elastic it looked and felt perfect. I used Presidents French Unsalted butter for the lamination. I’ve spent a while looking at getting a good flaky croissant, and it seems the less folds the better, so I did 3 Folders to create a total of 27 layers, and shaped them and left them in the fridge over night to prove.

I got a total of 7 croissants, as I did them dramatically bigger than previous times.

500g Strong Bread Flour
80g Caster Sugar
300ml Cold water
10g Salt
7g Yeast
250g Block of COLD Butter (minimum 82% Fat)

Combine all the ingredients leaving 1 3rd of the water out and ALL the butter, add more water if it's too dry, and add 1 teaspoon of flour if it's too wet, and kneed it untill it's soft smooth and elastic. When it's Kneeded put it into the fridge for an hour  while it's chilling flatten the butter to around 4mm thick I do mine between a large sheet of baking paper folded in half as I can use the folded part to get a straight edge to aid in the placement on the dough to be laminated. I did 3 fold one third over the 2nd third over the final 3rd and reputed this 3 times to get 27 Layers after reading this article on their experiments on lamination. 

I left the shaped dough to prove over night in the fridge and came down from waking put the oven on and preheated it to 200°C and put the first batch into the oven, after about 10 minutes my flat started to smell really funning almost like the butter was burning! 
And it was it all leaked out and down onto the bottom one the oven where it started to burn and smoke and fill my flat with smoke, luckily I got to it before the alarms went off. I had to leave them in the hot oven for a further 10 minutes with it turned off to allow it to settle, before removing them from the smoking oven and to clean the oven before resuming. img_0431

I ended up putting them into the cake tins I have to try and finish off the cooking. they are 8 inch round tins the croissants still continued to leak butter but this time it wasn't burning on the bottom of the oven but img_0432it was causing the bottoms of the croissants to burn and caramelise. which is not good at all as it makes it chewy and very greasy and no one likes that on/in a croissant. 
I then moved the final 3 of them to my shallow brownie baking tray. but these 3 I forgot to egg wash, with my egg wash I only use the yolk and a pinch of salt I have switched to egg yolks only because I can a nice shiny glossy when it's baked, sometimes I'll add two coats after the first one has been left to dry to get a deep shine.

As you can see I have a good rise and flake but due to the leaking butter I class this as a failure. and the inside isn’t very appealing, although you can see the layers they are HUGE thick monsters.

It could be because I knower kneaded the dough and it became to bread like or could be not enough layers, but it has a fantastic flavour that could match the store bought ones maybe better due to it being hand made but I don’t know.

I just have to keep trying and use a different butter next time.



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