Kiss Your Baker...

...in fact if you're enjoying anything with Puff Pastry like Croissants, Turnovers, etc. then please, heavily make out with your baker.  If you had even the slightest idea what your baker puts into those puff pastries you wouldn't think twice about the make out session!

Today we made Classical Puff Pastry (which is layers of dough with butter in between), Inverted Puff Pastry (which is just the opposite so layers of butter with dough in between) and Croissants (which is similar to a classical puff pastry with yeast, so it rises).  I highly underestimated what today would involve.  I knew it took some time and effort to make the puff pastry dough but I never imagined it would take all day...and we're still not even done, there's more work to do with them tomorrow before baking them.  Oh my!

The way puff pastry puffs, in case you don't know, is you roll out your dough and fold it with a block of butter in between.  Between each step of the process you have to let your dough rest.   Then you  roll out the dough with the butter in it and fold it, in a particular way while altering folding techniques in each step.  Roll it out again and fold it differently than the last time.  For ours we did two folds on the croissants and the inverted puff pastry.  Once they are ready to bake you have created layers of dough with butter in between each layer.  This is actually called laminated dough...you get the idea.  You place the dough in a hot oven, I believe Chef said we would start with a 400 degree oven, which will melt the butter quickly creating steam.  The steam will then push each layer upward creating that flaky, buttery pastry I'm sure you're familiar with.

We also did croissants and the most difficult part of this whole process was rolling them.  This is something that is going to require much practice.  Some of mine were fat while others we almost good enough.  This requires not rolling the dough too thin, cutting them all the same size, and rolling them all the same way (which was most difficult because I barely knew what I was doing).  I don't have any pics today but tomorrow I'll take some of my croissants and show you.

We baked nothing today.  We rolled out dough, let it rest, rolled it out again, and on and on all day long.  And still there's so much more rolling to do tomorrow, can you even believe it?  A whole day of making pastry dough.  The thing is Chef baked off his croissants and they were amazing...so buttery and flaky, delicate but crisp crust on the outside while being so soft and chewy on the inside.  If handmade puff pastry dough is truly this good how am I ever going to go back to that store bought stuff...and yet how am I ever going to find the time to make puff pastry at home? 

Tomorrow we start rolling out our classical puff pastry and proof and bake our croissants (proofing is a process using humidity to encourage the fermentation of the yeast dough and puff up the croissants before baking them).  I think we're complete with our inverted puff pastry so probably nothing much to do with that tomorrow.  Today was great.  I learned so much.  My notes were insane, I can barely keep track of all the information I took in.  Especially since this is an area I've never worked with; yeast breads.  I'm like a kid taking everything in and trying my best to process all of it.