croissants, en français

In an effort to catch up on the blogging, particularly with regard to mom and dad and baba's visit, I'm promising a new blog post every day until Christmas! Okay, so that's only six posts, but for infrequent bloggers like us, that's hard enough. But, before we can start on the trip, we have to tell you about what we did just before that.

A number of my colleagues speak at least some French, and one of them, Julia (but pronounced German-style, like Yulia) took a couple of French cooking and language classes with me a few months back. (I spoke more French than most of the students, but ended up learning some handy German kitchen vocabulary.) We got talking, and thought that it might be fun to have a French food and language party sometime for everyone who would be interested. We wanted to have it before the new year at least, and people's schedules were filling up, so we ended up settling for a brunch at our place the day before my family arrived. While people were encouraged to bring something to eat which they considered "French", we weren't really going to cook together, but rather plan a cooperative supper for sometime in the new year.

I wasn't sure at first what to make, but then Julia mentioned that she was considering making croissants from scratch. Both of us had baked plenty of types of bread and pastries, but neither of us had attempted croissants before, and I was a bit nervous. It's something you have to start the day before, and it involves folding a sheet of butter into a dough, rolling it out, folding it over again (thus creating more layers of butter in the dough), and repeating several times.

We decided to give it a go, and so Julia came over Friday night to prepare the dough with me. Between us, we collected careful photographic evidence of each step of the process, though I think the latter steps ended up on her camera instead. Still, I've got a good beginning. Here's the preparation of the sponge (with fresh yeast, which is more common here than in Canada).
This was then turned into a soft dough, and left to rest in the fridge for a while:
Before starting, we compared a few recipes from different print sources (notably the Joy of Cooking and The Bread Bible by Beth Hensperger), and several online recipe sites, in French, English, and German. What was interesting about the online sites was that the method given in French and English was essentially the same (i.e. make a basic soft yeast dough, roll it out, put on a sheet of butter, fold over in thirds like an envelope, roll out to full size, fold over again, refrigerate for a while, roll out and fold again, roll out and fold again, refrigerate overnight, and then shape, let rise, and bake the next day), while the German recipes all made the dough the night before, but didn't add the butter until the next day. Weird. In any case, we opted for the French/English order of operations, basing it mostly on the whole wheat croissant recipe from the aforementioned Bread Bible (which Julia bought, after I lent her Hensperger's book Baking Bread, which I love), but we adapted it for only white flour.

Okay, enough details, and more pictures. While the dough was resting, we had to beat the butter with an electric mixer and a bit of flour to get it smooth, and then roll it out to a rectangle (using sheets of plastic wrap to avoid covering everything with butter.
Then the rectangle of butter was put into the fridge, to become cool but still workable. In the meantime, the dough could come out, and we rolled it out into a large rectangle (something like 19" by 26", though I don't recall exactly - we did use my sheep-shaped measuring tape for knitting to make sure it was about right). Then came the exciting part - half the butter was laid out in the center third of the dough, and it was folded over. Another slab of butter went on top, and the remaining third of dough sealed that inside.
This was then rolled out again, and folded over again, before being put into the fridge to rest for an hour or so. (In the meantime we had a couple of beers.) Then the rolling and folding happened a couple more times, until there were 162 layers of butter in the dough. That's the initial two layers of butter (from the first folding), multiplied by 3 four times for each rolling and folding into thirds. (i.e. 2 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 162)

Finally, the dough could rest in the fridge overnight, and we could sleep until 8:30 the next morning when we had to get up to roll out and shape the dough. Here's the dough in the fridge the next morning, after having risen to the full height of our admittedly small shelf:

And then half of it was rolled out to a large, thin rectangle...
and cut into triangles and rectangles for croissants and pains au chocolat, respectively.
The croissants were rolled up, and the the chocolate was encased in pastry...
and these were left to rise for a couple of hours until they were nice and plump.
In the meantime, we rearranged the furniture, to put two tables together in the living room to better accommodate 6 people, as well as to take advantage of the morning sun in our front room. The table was set, and we were ready to go!
At this point we put the pastries into the oven, but I think those pictures were only on Julia's camera. I don't even have a picture of a finished sheet coming out, but I can show you this blow-up from a larger picture, of the remains of a pastry on someone's plate. It's hard to tell from here, but they were perfect. Still clearly hand-shaped, but really beautiful, and buttery. And with a lovely colour from the egg glaze that went on just before they were baked.
And the party was fun too, with people staying from around 10:00 until almost 5:00! We've made plans for the next supper at the end of January, and I'm looking forward to it already.