Monday, November 26, 2012

Croissants

I know I have made croissants on this blog before, but this is a different recipe:  Julia Child's!  This is from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II - the first recipe I have made from that volume.

Julia's was different from the other croissant recipe I had made in several ways; first, the dough was very watery / sticky and not as bready as my other recipe.  Also, you're supposed to smear cold butter onto the risen dough rather than fold in a chilled butter slab.  I think I actually prefer the slab method to this one, because the smearing produced some uneven chunks of butter that didn't fully get into the layers.  (In fact, a lot of bakers have heavily modified Julia's recipe; see one here.)

But the "fold in three, chill, roll out and fold again" method produced a dough with (allegedly) 55 layers of dough and butter.  (I didn't check Julia's math.)  Mmm!



This one also took a lot of time to rise; I think I wouldn't make these again unless I had all day to do it.  But they were good, and as always my in-laws loved them.  Maybe I will do them again at Christmas for my mom's family.  I also would really like to check out more recipes from Volume II, which has a lot of meats enclosed in pastry, as well as sausage-making and new vegetables.

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