Picture, if you will, five Americans, the oldest 21 years old, driving the cheapest possible rental car through the Loire Valley in an era before GPS. Then imagine that only one of those five Americans – that would have been me – could drive a stick. It was an adventure. Despite the lack of digital photo evidence, I remember two things clearly from that week of driving. 1. There are far too many roundabouts (or traffic circles, or rotaries – whatever it is you call them) in the Loire Valley. 2. I swear every single one of them led to Beaucouzé.
Another thing I vividly remember is that the car was a disaster by the end of a week of five people eating baguette and croissants in it. There were crumbs absolutely everywhere.
Until these pandemic times, it had never occurred to me try to make croissants. But, a combination of too many episodes of The Great British Baking Show and nothing else to do had me attempting laminated dough. I’m not including a recipe because it’s not mine, and it’s involved. For this one, I turned to the Poilâne cookbook. I’ll confess, I sometimes have the bad habit of not always reading the entire recipe first. Don’t do that. You definitely want to read the whole thing and plan enough time for this. Important tip: the dough is refrigerated overnight before you start rolling and folding.
So, let’s talk about making a butter square, and then (after chilling it) rolling that square into your square of dough. I cheated a bit on squaring things off, and regretted it later in the process. You want everything as squared off as possible.
Then, once you have you have your square, there’s all the rolling and folding. You roll to a rectangle, fold like a business letter, then chill the folded dough for two hours before doing it all over again for a total of three turns.
I don’t have pictures of rolling and shaping the final product, but there are excellent photos demonstrating this in Poilâne. The dough can be frozen, so I baked half of it one day, then tried again with the second half a week later with better results. I rushed the final rise the first time, and while the layers were generally there, the croissants were far too dense. The second time around, they rose better, but I still failed to get them evenly browned.
Now I’m a bit obsessed with eventually getting this right, which is a little disturbing considering how much butter is involved in the process.
Bon Appétit!