Croissant Masterclass with Scott Megee

[Music] what goes in a croissant oh well let's have a look so we start off with baker's flour baker's flour is important because we need the protein structure within our flour flour has five proteins it has gladen glutenin globulin albumin and protease gliadin and glutenin chemically bond together in the presence of water to form gluten this is what gives out dough the ability to stretch and hold its shape so 11.5% protein to twelve and a half depending on which flour you can get our second ingredient is sugar this is what gives us our sweetness but also aids to our coloring of our final product we've also got salt salt will give us yeast control it will also give us crust color in the final product very important thing to have in our dough and we have dry yeast now I use a thermo tolerant yeast this is a yeast that is designed for sweet based products the other product that I have in in the dough in the base dough is just a little bit butter this butter gives you flexibility and helps you roll out your dough and gives you the ability to fold it nicely the other secret ingredient I have in mind is deactivated yeast deactivated yeast is dead yeast cells what this does is it doesn't give you any fermentation but it gives you beautiful flexibility in your dough you can stretch this dough and get beautiful laminations without giving it long rests in between each fold the other ingredients we're using is milk okay this enriches the product it also contains a sugar that is unfermented all to yeast so the lactose within my milk stays in my product until it hits the oven and that gives you that rich golden brown color from the caramelization of the lactose also using water as well just to combine our ingredients the other thing I do to my croissant dough is I add a small portion 10-percent of old scrap dough so this is dough that's been rolled out and shaped into croissants and all the scrap bits that I cut off the ends I keep and then I mix back into the dough to give you a better flavor this acts like a proof event so let's get mixing [Music] so placing all of our ingredients into the mixing bowl and we're going to give it five minutes on first speed that five minutes allows the protein to absorb the water and to form that gluten that we require and I want around about seventy-five percent gluten development in this dough we are going to form more gluten as it sits and we're going to form more gluten structure as we laminate it so we can't over mix our dough at this point if we do by the time we then do laminate it will over stretch the gluten and will break the structure within the dough so it's important to slightly under mix your dough my old croissant olive is cut into pieces and I'll feed that in and when we go into second speed if I was to add that now this portion of the dough would destroy the other portion dough because this has already been mixed to full development so let's start five minutes on first move so it's had its five minutes on first B we're now gonna let it mix for about 30 seconds and then we'll slowly add our scrap dough this is running at around about 54% moisture or water and milk combination okay and the extra butter that we put into will soften it off ever so slightly so the thinner you can stretch it the more gluten you have in us okay now as you can see with this one as I stretch it it's breaking so it needs a little bit more it is a very it's a tight dough so but you can see that it's got good good stretch and good bounce in it which is an indication of gluten formation gladen gives you the ability to stretch glutenin gives you ability to spring back so we want the product to rise and stretch but we also want it to hold its shape that's why gluten is so important in these products how do we know this is at 75% we do a window test so what we do is grab a piece of dough and we just stretch it as far as we can and as thin as we can this will tell us how much gluten is there there so the thinner I can get it and the clearer that it is the more gluten that you have so you can see that it's cloudy but if you can see that mesh inside it is so there's plenty of gluten there it's got good bounce so that's in good condition [Music] this is 12 millimeters if I now make my butter 12 millimeters it will then give us beautiful even lamination lines throughout our product butter I'm using is calming butter it's a cultured butter and this will give our product a slightly natural yogurt flavor it's like this lactic acid flavor I think it gives us you a really nice flavor profile to our croissant but you can see that it's too hard if I was to try to put this into our croissant now it would rupture our layers so we have to go through a process called conditioning and it's effectively just rolling or beating the butter until it becomes soft and pliable and now that becomes a beautiful pliable piece of butter that we can now laminate into our pastry so this is being rolled down to four millimeters I'm now going to do a single fold in my butter so now I have 12 millimeters of butter and that will match the thickness of our pastry now butter is condition dough that we had sitting in the fridge over for the last 24 hours after we mixed it yesterday is now ready to be laminated so what I do is I place my butter in the middle of the pastry I then get a knife and really carefully cut pastry either side of the butter then placing the cut portions on top now if this exposes the four sides of the pastry and the butter I believe this gives us a better lamination because we get 100% lamination if I leave a fold in there what happens is we can get portions of the dough that don't get laminated properly so by cutting it and placing it on top we get really crisp clean edges to secure the butter I just put a few little dimples in it just to secure it and then it's ready to go for its first roll okay when you were placed on the machine make sure that the you place it with the cut going into the machine if you were to roll it that way the cut would separate so place it going long ways through the machine and let's start rolling when I roll it down to around about ten millimeters thick we don't want to stress the dough too much if we go down too quickly we can put too much tension in the dough and it become a tight dough okay so that's ten point five now what we need to do is we need to do what we call an offset book fold we get one of our ends we fold it three quarters up then we get our other edge three quarters down making sure that our pastry meets a nice clean line in the middle and then we fold it in half again now you can start to see how we start to generate our layers within our croissant we always give our croissant pastry a 90 degree turn and we always roll out from our open ends not our closed ends okay so that's ready to go now back into the machine and roll out for its second roll same processes before two increments at a time but too much stress on the dough making sure that it hits the roll is straight it's down to ten millimeters this time we're not going to do an offset book fold we're going to do a single fold so we always like to work with straight edges so I'm just going to trim this edge straight like so and we fold it up around about half we take our scraps that we've cut off one end and we just place them in the inside of our dough to create a straight line and then we fold our right hand side over and the dough has to meet edge to edge okay and you can see that's a little bit so we'll read fix that there we go and now that goes into the fridge and it has a rest for at least 20 minutes and we're just covering it to make sure that it doesn't form a skin my croissant dough I like to do one book fold into single folds this is its last single fold so starting making sure that we're runts again rolling through our open ends not our closed ends down to ten millimeters again and now we're ready for our last single fault so once again one straightedge this also helps check that our laminations are in good condition one side up place your scrap inside making a straight line and then folding it over the top that is ready to go back into the fridge about a half an hour rest okay allow the gluten to relax and then that will be ready for rolling and shaping our dough's had its final bolt and its final recipe is now ready to be rolled out for its final shaping now we'll get most of the length through the open ends but I'm just rolling it out in the closed ends just to get my width that I'm require as you can see my pastry is now sailing to stress you're going to see rounded edges that means it's fighting against the gluten structure so at this point we turn it around and we'll get our lengths out of our open ends now depending on what size of croissant and Danish we're making will determine how thick or thin your pastry will be generally I roll this down to around about five mil to do a static force on so it's happens time to rest around about five minutes just to so it stops the contraction of our product and when we cut it and we need to now prepare for both we're going to get croissants out of the bottom part and then pen a chocolate out at the top but if you notice that I've got my pastry hanging over the edge of the bench in my world everything is based off measurements and you can see with pastry it's a natural product and it doesn't have a straight line but if we use the bench as a straight line we can then measure correctly for each product so we'll just cut off that edge the other reason I cut off the edge is that is the rounded edge that won't puff in the oven because all of my laminations go around the corners around the bender so we get rid of that and that becomes our scrap that we use for our next dough so it's now ready to make croissant and penner truckle are depending on what one we're making I normally have my Prasant around about 30 centimetres long I like to hand-cut my croissants I believe it gives me a better product I get crisper edges if we use the cut as it does have a tendency to crimp or crush my edges so I hand cut my all of my product so 30 centimeters and then the top part will turn into our panel chokolate which will go 14 centimeters by 8 centimeters and we now need to place the chocolate inside it so there are many ways of doing it this is just the way that I do it evenly spaced allowing for enough expansion to almost three times their size from what they are now I'm going to place them in a prover really important we don't want to prove this over 32 degrees butter melts at 32 degrees so we never prove anything with butter in at over 32 degrees so somewhere between 28 and 32 degrees as a maximum is what you want to prove these there with around about 70 to 75 percent relative humidity so a slightly damp environment this stops the skin from forming on the hours I've squared my ends off I've got 30 centimeters I now go through and mark 10 centimeters wide along the bottom at the top I come in high-five whatever I've done at the bottom measurement so I did 10 so I come in 5 centimeters and then from that 5 centimeter mark I then measure 10 centimeters that gives me a center point for the triangle I then cut my triangles so we've got our 30 centimeter by 10 centimeter triangles we then just need to do a little cut at the base of each croissant around about two centimeters this helps us stretch the croissant a little bit when we come to roll it ok and now they're ready to roll so how I roll a croissant try to imagine where they come from they come from Paris or France and the most iconic image in France is the Eiffel Tower so I make my product look like the Eiffel Tower I stretch it I sacrifice the laminations on the very tip and I then roll from the base up making sure that it's centered and by squashing it on the bench your tip will always end at the bottom of your product so do that again so down stretch out about a quarter of its length again squash roll keeping the wall center [Music] ready to go into the rivers we normally do somewhere between 2.5 to 3 hours at no higher than 32 degrees the recipe I use for my egg wash is whole egg and I like to water it down ever so slightly with a little bit of milk but it's really important then we put a bit of salt in our egg wash this denatures the egg washing allows you to have this beautiful thin coating over your croissants and Danish all right so 16 minutes 180 degrees two seconds of steam if you don't have the steam that's okay steam just gives you a little bit more volume and you know you've got a good product when it starts to wobble I'm wobbling yes I slaughter they just live in the wind the lamination is important you've got to have the butter and you've got to have your pastry at the same consistency so you get really even layers out of your product proving is obviously are also really important making sure you get the maximum volume this will also give you great taste because the longer you can ferment something the better flavors you'll come get it come through your product and obviously baking as well we're looking for three colors so I want yellow golden brown and varnish okay so the very tips just go ever so darker than what the middle bit that what that does is give you three different levels of flavor in your product and when you eat it it experi you experience more flavor as you would consume your product and just be patient with them when you're baking you've got to be patient so given the time time to give them a beautiful color time to get beautiful volume time to do just time baking is about time and just being patient with the product the product will tell you when it's ready to go it's always good to look at it in natural light because the ovens give you a false a false reading there we have it some beautifully baked croissants and panitch Alcala so as you can see we've got beautiful laminations in the sides beautiful gloss on the on the top and beautiful crispy outer shell let them cool down and when we eat them they're just gonna be delicious we've gone through the process of making our croissants now what makes a good croissant well let's cut into it and see so first off I've got a beautiful glazed finish to my croissant nice and shiny very attractive beautiful laminations down the side but now we need to cut into it and see if it's what its internals are like so just with a nice sharp knife what we should have is a really open honeycomb finish to our product and there it is beautiful nice and open beautiful structure and it would just taste of on I can't even talk can I it doesn't get much better than that [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Artisan Crust

Views: 326,211

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Id: NLJZLrEM-bk

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020