How to Make Kouign-Amann: The Perfect Pastry | Yewande Komolafe | NYT Cooking

okay so how could I forget that's my favorite part I'm you want to laugh it and I'm a cooking writer for the New York Times and today I'm making a traditional queen of mine [Music] the queen of mine is a traditional vinoiseri from Breton kind of looks like a pie and you slice it in little triangles it's made from a laminated dough which means that it has a bread dough base and butter is folded in many turns and that gives it like nice little layers it has a pound of butter in it it's really rich it's buttery it's toasty it's such an experience getting to make it it's a process that like drew me in I learned how to make it from a pastry chef based in Montreal I did a pastry tour of Montreal really randomly with my husband and one of the places that we stopped by was a pastry shop called Queen Amon being in New York and working in pastry kitchens what I thought was Queen Amman were these little tiny muffin shaped pastries and so when I went into that shop and I asked for a queen of mine they cut me a slice of something and I was like oh wow like what is this and my husband and I shared it and kind of just like looked at each other like this is so delicious and so amazing and so I called the bakery and I said I'm really interested in your queen of mine I would love to come learn how to make it Chef Nikola said yes he was like very excited I ended up just going for two morning shifts I was there like really eager at like 6 a.m in the morning and she'll be having naked he showed me all the turns we had like a really Lively discussion about how he ended up there making this very specific pastry so I'm going to start with making the bread dough because that has to rise for a little bit I always like to put water in the bowl first if there's water in the bottom it gets everything as opposed to like putting the dry ingredients first stir all this together and let it sit for about six minutes and you can tell the yeast is active when it starts to foam it's getting a little foamy which is great it means that my yeast is active the flower goes in I like to add the salt on top of the flour salt is something that deactivates yeast and so I never really added directly into the yeast and water solution so this was something that Chef Nicola used it's not traditional but he said he liked it because it gave an extra like nutty flavor to the to the pastry and I thought that was brilliant and I've been putting toasted sesame oil in a lot of my baked goods like people don't can't really tell what it is but it's like nuttiness that it adds I'm mixing it to form a Shaggy dough I'm going to cut up my butter the smaller it is the easier it is to fold into the dough so that mixes until you form a smooth dough as the dough hook is like going around I can see that the gluten for the strands have formed because it's like pulling the whole dough with it as opposed to just pulling sections of the dough so the dough looks really elastic to me right now and I can tell that it's done I'm just scraping the dough out into a bag and I'm going to refrigerate this the reason I do this step in the refrigerator is because I want a slow rise I want to develop flavor in the refrigerator the next step is making the butter for lamination one thing that I found different about this specific pastry is that the butter for lamination contains sugar typically with croissants or puff pastry you're just folding butter into the dough but this specific dough has a combination of butter sugar and salt folded into it sugar it's a little pinch of salt so I'm just creaming butter and sugar here so this step is literally just to combine the butter and sugar you're not necessarily trying to whip air into it I'm spreading the butter into a 10 inch round you don't have to be extremely precise okay what I like to do is cover it and then just wrap it I'm going to put this in the fridge because at this point my dough is still Rising this step I'm going to make the syrup that goes over the pastry while it's baking this is the part of the recipe where you could play around a little bit I'm seasoning it with a bunch of spices that I like so I've got some cardamom some cloves cinnamon and ginger and some orange peel that smells amazing so my sugar goes in now and then water this smells amazing and has come to a boil so I'm going to turn it off and let the orange peel and spices just steep in there I'm just going to strain it to get the solids out and that's my syrup I know this is a non-stick pan but I just as a second step of assurance to make sure it doesn't stick I'm just putting a little coat of butter and then I'm gonna put syrup on the bottom of the pan and then I'm just going to set this aside while I roll out my dough so this is my dough after it has proofed I can smell it it smells really yeasty I put a nice layer of flour on my Surface because the dough is a little sticky so the goal here is to roll this into a 12 inch round and I keep lifting it to make sure that no part of this is sticking something that I like to do in between steps is to brush up the excess flour the flour is really just to make sure it's not sticking I don't want to add flour to my dough this is my butter that I put in the fridge it sat out for about 15 minutes to soften a little bit but you want it soft enough that when you're folding it it doesn't break it's just pliable I'm going to shape this circle into an 8 inch square and how I do that is by lifting it so I'm folding over the butter I brush up any excess flour so I have a nice little square so now I'm going to roll this out into a rectangle and I do that by kind of tapping down first making sure the edges are a little tapered you don't want to press it too much because don't forget you fold it in butter so if the more you press it the more like the butter is going to be pushed out towards the edges of the dough I want that butter to stay in there and I keep checking it to make sure there's no stickage I'm going to take the top side fold it over just about a third and then take the bottom short side and fold that so that the two short sides meet I'm putting some pressure just to adhere the sides and then turn the rectangle around so that they're the short sides are now parallel to you so that was the first fold the second fold is what I'm doing now I'm again rolling it out into a rectangle if the butter starts to feel soft just put it back in the refrigerator and let the dough rest and the butter chill also if you find that you're rolling it out and it's springing back on itself that means your dough has to relax and so put it in the refrigerator and let it sit for about 10 minutes okay so I'm doing the second fold and again I'm folding over the top just over a third of the dough pressing it down and then pressing it down at this point I'm going to roll it out into a square and then fold in the corners so that they all meet in the middle so I'm going to turn it again add some flour Don't Be Afraid add as much flour as you need to prevent stickage [Applause] all right okay so now this is a square brush it to get up any excess flour and then bring the corners in to the middle I can feel that my dough is getting a little warm my butter is starting to seep through a little bit so I'm going to put this in the refrigerator to relax the dough and chill the butter again before I work it I'm going to do that for about 10 minutes [Music] so I've let this chill in the fridge to relax the dough and chill the butter roll this out and then push the edges in to form around so to put this in the pan I'm going to flip it so that this is the bottom so I'm going to dock the dough and just poke it with a knife this is so that the syrup actually goes in the pastry spread this around with my fingers and then cover it and I'm going to let it sit for about 30 minutes to relax the dough you're not looking for the dough to poof up you're not looking for it to double in size this is really just to relax the dough now I'm going to put some dimples on the surface of the dough just to sort of dock the surface oh look at the little tart so this has been in the oven for 45 minutes one of the steps that I was shown was to flip the tart to make sure that the syrup gets on the bottom and the top and the bottom gets nice and caramelized this part is a little tricky because you're working with a hot pan this is going to get hot and you're trying to flip it so just go slow with this part and if you flip it and it falls into the sink like it did at home I still ate it it was still delicious so not All Is Lost I'm flipping it onto a surface that doesn't have a lip because I'm going to slide it right back in [Music] all that butter so I'm pouring in some syrup on the bottom of the pan so that the top gets a good dipping that syrup okay [Music] it's been about 20 minutes oh it's nice and golden brown for me this is like the scariest part of it what a beauty I'm gonna let this sit for about five minutes before I move it to the serving platter it smells amazing it smells buttery and all the love that went into making it foreign I'm gonna eat the whole thing that's so good the top is a little chewy because of all the sugar syrup the salt finish and getting that it's like really toasted because of the sesame oil all the spices that we steeped in the sugar syrup and getting like a little orange and clove and cardamom notes I'm so happy with this I hope everyone enjoys the process as much as I did it's a wonderful reward at the end and I think that this is something that's for sharing it's something that you like present at the table like look at all my hard work this reminds me of summer in Montreal and walking into the bakery and being hit with this smell of baking pastries and syrup and all the wonderful things you guys have to taste this like right now everybody has to taste this while it's still warm

Channel: NYT Cooking

Views: 195,464

Keywords: cooking, cooks, recipes, recipe, how-to, how to, kitchen, new york times, new york times cooking, nyt cooking, nyt, nytimes, yewande komolafe, Kouign-Amann, breton, pastry

Id: K9-Fx52yw7Y

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023