FLAKEY HOMEMADE CROISSANTS (Beginner Friendly)

hey what's up i'm not gonna lie making croissants at home is fussy it's time-consuming and it took me a lot of tries to get this process figured out but the final product is so good that it's definitely worth a little bit of struggle so today i'm gonna show you how to make a flaky buttery hand rolled croissant at home and a few tricks along the way so that you can get these right first try to get started i've got my stand mixer set up and into the bowl of that i'm going to measure 165 grams of warm water 165 grams of whole milk 8 grams of yeast 50 grams of sugar 515 grams of all-purpose flour and 10 grams of salt the dough hook goes on and i like to mix this dough in two stages the first of which happens on medium speed for roughly two to three minutes all we're looking to do here is to get that water and milk to hydrate the flour once things have come together and the dough starting to get pushed around the bowl like this i'm going to grab 40 grams of softened butter and start the second stage of this mix as you can see the butter is cubed up into smallish pieces so that i can add them in one piece at a time this should help the butter get better incorporated into the dough but inevitably there will be some smeared butter stuck to the inside of the bowl and don't sweat that eventually the dough will start to grab it all now that that butter's in the dough we actually need to knead this stuff so the speed's gonna go up to high and i'm gonna continue to mix this for five whole minutes and if you're wondering hey bry can i do this by hand well yes but it is gonna be harder start by crumbling the butter into the flour as best you can then mix the dry with the wet that's the water and the milk that's gonna take a second to come together and then we can flip the dough out of the bowl and start to knead by hand on the cutting board for six to seven minutes this is gonna replicate that high speed mix that we're doing over on the stand mixer this is messy work and it's gonna be kind of greasy but if you really go for it you're gonna get something that resembles dough from a stand mixer for sure and there we go hand mixed croissant dough if you dare back to the mixer this has been mixing on high speed for five minutes and the dough is clearing the bowl and should be quite strong but there's only one way to know for sure so i'm gonna flip this up and give it a good tug to see how we like it and it doesn't tear or sheer and that means the gluten is ready to rip now i'm gonna flip this over into a medium bowl and to give ourselves a more uniform starting point for when we sheet this dough later we're gonna get this rolled up into a nice taut round ball and the move here is just what we do for most of these stretch and folds on our dose we're just trying to tuck that ball into a nice taut little thingy yeah that looks good now i'm gonna put the lid on and throw it on top of my refrigerator out of the way for 90 minutes in the meantime when you sort out probably the most important part of a croissant the butter block for that i'm starting with two large sheets of parchment paper i've got a ruler here as well and then a clicky pen to make some lines with now on the tops of that parchment paper i'm gonna make two points in the center eight inches apart and then from there i'm gonna use the ruler to throw down two straight lines that are going from the top and the bottom to show where i want my butter to sit next i'm gonna fold deep creases into the parchments on the two lines that i just drew this is gonna help hold that butter in tightly then i'm gonna fold the top in about an inch or two and then the bottom another inch or two and there we go we should have two roughly eight inch by 12 to 14 inch tall rectangles now for the butter this is a whole block or roughly 225 grams of grass-fed irish butter called kerrygold and it is 82 butter fat you can definitely get away with regular butter but it might take a few attempts to actually get to the point where you're laminating the dough if you don't do this right you end up making a brioche which is still good but not the same thing as a croissant this butter's been sitting at room temp for about 45 minutes so it is soft and well tempered but it is definitely not mushy this is in the perfect spot to make a butter block okay to get this butter rolled into a sheet that we can actually laminate into a dough we're going to lay down this block of butter into the center of that parchment that we just folded and then cover that with the second piece of parchment and then smash this block down just a little bit flatter into a smear of butter now i'm going to fold up all four sides of this parchment paper to seal in the butter so that when we roll it out nothing escapes then i'm going to flip it over so that the folds are facing the board and now i've got a nice square flat compartment that's going to help shape our butter block using rolling pin now i'm going to beat this butter down laterally to flatten it and to start to spread it out i'm going to be using this move a lot from this point forward because when we're shaping large chunks of butter it responds way better to blunt force like this than the rolling pressure of a rolling pin once things are flat we can actually start rolling with the rolling pin and see why the folding was worth all that extra effort the rolling pin easily pushes this butter directly into the perfectly square corners of this paper and it is so extremely satisfying when you see it fill that corner the work is worth it just for that once this butter's been pushed into all four corners and spread into an even thin layer with no voids or cracks take a look it's malleable and bendy and it's gonna be much easier to incorporate into a dough for now i'm gonna throw this into the fridge and keep it frosty until the dough is ready speaking of frosty look at the frosted cereal from the sponsor of this video magic spoon let's take a second to 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magicspoon.com brian lagerstrom if you don't like this cereal they will refund you no questions asked so it's actually pretty low risk thank you magic spoon for bringing cereal back into my life and for sponsoring this video back to the dough it's been 90 minutes and this dough is about doubled it's gassy it's buoyant and alive now hit the top with some flour then my cutting board and then flip out the dough once i've got this pushed into a rectangular-ish slab of dough i'm gonna dust it with some more flour and then grab my rolling pin to start to roll this out i'm gonna get this thing pushed out until it's roughly 18 inches tall and eight to nine inches wide this is a little bit of a pre-shape and it's going to allow us to push this dough and butter further in a few minutes next i'm going to lay down some parchment so i can fold this dough in half without it sticking to itself then onto a sheet tray it goes this does room temp right now and it needs to be much cooler for lamination so in the fridge it goes for 20 minutes and in the meantime out of the fridge comes that butter block that we made earlier it's very cold and brittle at the moment but 20 minutes at room temperature will make it bendy like it was before 20 minutes later the butter block should be much more pliable but it's always good to unwrap and check before we move forward if there was one key to successful croissants at home it's keeping the butter in this pliable state moving forward cold hard butter is bad malleable flexible butter is very good all right my slab of dough is good and frosty after 20 minutes in the fridge and now i'm gonna roll this out just a little bit more i want it to be about 18 to 20 inches tall and about eight to nine inches wide and notice i'm doing my best to kind of maintain right angles around the edges here but don't worry about it we aren't really going for perfection now i'm gonna size up my butter sheet and it needs to be slightly less wide than the dough that looks pretty good so i'm gonna flip it on over you'll notice that this butter only covers about two-thirds of this dough and that's by design the first folding here is kind of a cheat we're gonna get our butter locked into the dough and our first two layers of folding done at the same time this gives us more time in the temperature sweet spot and overall simplifies the lamination process a lot now to do this fold i'm gonna grab the top third of the dough and fold it over the middle third then i'm gonna grab the bottom third and fold it over that when i turn it you can see how we have two layers of butter in this dough already and we didn't need to work the dough at all and the butter hasn't really changed temperature yet which is ideal now i'm gonna smush this down with the rolling pin a little bit to help seal in the juices then on the open side i'm going to seal things up with a firm pinch from top to bottom if this butter got loose in my cutting board it would be a mess now i'm feeling good about where the temperature of this butter is and i don't think it's really had enough time to get too warm and mushy yet so we are going to move forward with the second fold at this point again i prefer using the blunt force of the rolling pin to do most of the work when the dough is thick like this it helps spread the butter more gently too much downward pressure in a localized spot with the rolling motion will press the butter into pockets and that's not very chill once this slab is gently coerced into an eight inch wide 16 18 inch tall slab yet again i'm going to do a book style fold this time the right side gets folded into the middle then the left side gets folded into the middle and then that whole thing is going to get folded in half and we've basically just quadrupled our layers without any additional rolling this is just another thrifty way to simplify the lamination process to save time and hence preserve the temperature of the butter we basically get two folds worth of layers in one move okay i've got this book shape flattened back into a slab but the butter starting to get warm and the dough is starting to snap back a little bit so i'm going to throw this into the refrigerator so the dough can relax and this butter can firm up just a little bit so into the fridge it goes for 20 minutes after that 20 minutes the butter temp has been reset to that fully malleable spot and the dough has relaxed enough for us to actually roll it thin into a croissant so the board gets dusted and the dough is gonna get dusted on both sides then using a rolling pin we're gonna gently pound this even flatter i'm gonna give this four to five passes until it's about half as thick as when we started and if you see some air bubbles in there go ahead and pop those i'm going to use a cake tester to prick them and then use my rolling pin to push out that gas i'm going to roll this out in two stages if we do too much work here the dough is going to start to get tight and we can't roll it out anymore and the butter is going to get too soft so once we're at a 12 inch by 16 inch ish slab i'm going to pop this back in the fridge for 15 minutes after that 15 minutes we're going to move into the second half of shaping where we push this out that last 30 to 40 percent i want to reiterate don't use downward pressure of the rolling pin too much banging it with the rolling pin makes things move a little bit faster and keeps that butter a little bit more intact cut to what happens when the butter is just a little bit too cold and use just a little bit too much downward pressure from that rolling pin as you can see butter shards the butter is completely cracked and broken and this is a super unfun thing to happen so beware cutting back to the slab i've got it rolled out into a quarter inch thick sheet that's about 14 inches tall and 18 to 20 inches wide and don't worry centimeters for all of this will be in the description now i'm gonna square up the edges real quick then using a ruler i'm gonna mark every four inches or so on the bottom then on the top i'm gonna move in two inches and then mark every four inches this is gonna create eight total croissants now using a pizza cutter i'm gonna cut these into even triangles the best i can hopefully by the time you get to the end your eighth croissant won't look as rugged as mine does but it doesn't really matter all the hard work here is done in the lamination and if these aren't perfect whatever now i'm gonna stretch these out a little bit i want to add two to three inches of length then once they're stretched i'm going to go to the wider end and stretch that about another inch this is going to give these croissants a pro tapered look from there i'm going to roll this up tightly trying to keep the skinny end in the dead center i also like to try and keep the tip of the croissant tucked onto the bottom as well now i'm going to move this over to a sheet tray lined with parchment paper and i'm gonna roll out the other seven and i'll mention feel free to freeze half of these once they're rolled out i would freeze them on a plate and then move them over to a bag for storage then the next time you want a croissant all you need to do is thaw them proof them and then bake them off once these are rolled out now we need to proof them up so i'm going to move them over to my oven where i can create a mini little proofing cabinet to do that i've got a shallow saute pan full of boiling water and i'm going to load it into the bottom of the oven that steam is going to warm up the box a few degrees and keep things just a bit humid so that nothing dries out proofing time is going to vary pretty widely depending on the temperature of your dough and your house but mine took 90 minutes to get fully proofed up and take a look these look amazing now i'm going to pre my oven to 425 degrees 218c and while that heats i'm going to head back over to these proof chrissies and egg wash them two times to make that i just cracked one egg and added about 20 grams of whole milk and stirred it up that little bit of milk in the wash is going to help with caramelization because milk salads brown very nicely after 20 minutes we're going to brush them for a second time and also double check that they're proof properly give them a poke that dough should indent just a little bit and then pop back out slowly these look very good once we have two full coats of egg wash and the oven is preheated into the oven they go for 18 to 20 minutes if we got that proof right these should start to rise quite a bit and start to unfurl all those layers an underproof croissant will leach out a lot of butter and not really rise at all 10 minutes in we're going to rotate and flip these trays to get a much more even bake as we know most ovens have hot and cold spots and when we're dealing with butter and sugar combined in a dough these can go from perfect to burnt quicker than we'd like that last eight to ten minutes should pass pretty uneventfully but resist the urge to pull these out too early channel your inner bry here and bake these dark blonde croissants just aren't as good as well tan ones i know from experience after 18 minutes in the oven it's time to pull these things out and all i can really say is wow they're burnished with a deep golden brown crust and as you can see all those layers of butter have teamed up to make a flaky but delicate pastry this smell you guys the smell is just insane i've cooked a lot of tasty things here in my house but none of them have smelled like this sweet european butter layered with care and baked perfection is just amazing when i cut into one you can see how flaky these actually are like i said these are not the easiest things to get right they're fussy and there can be a lot of trial and error but in the end when you get there you have a warm fresh flaky buttery croissant that was made by you and they're world class you guys let's eat this thing [Music]

Channel: Brian Lagerstrom

Views: 805,806

Keywords: croissants, croissant, homemade croissants, beginner croissants, flakey croissant, how to make croissants, croissants at home, croissants from scratch, croissant recipe, perfect croissants, buttery croissants, how to make croissants at home, baking croissants, weeds and sardines, brian lagerstrom, recipes, cooking, pastry, bread recipe, pastry recipe

Id: mT4cqHc4HqU

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021