How to Make Yeasted Puff Pastry | Bake It Up A Notch with Erin McDowell

[Music] fresh baked pies served daily like the sand says i don't know why i suddenly did an [Music] accent [Music] welcome to this episode of bake it up a notch i've put on my croissant button sweater specifically for the occasion because today we are making yeasted puff pastry i love the process of making puff pastry i love it so much it was actually one of our very first episodes of bake it up a notch but that was classic puff pastry this is yeast raised puff pastry where a yeast raised dough goes through the process of lamination getting that butter block inside and making tons of flaky layers that bake up crisp but also with this beautiful honeycomb light fluffy texture on the inside yeasted puff pastry isn't necessarily a lot more difficult than classic puff pastry in fact the techniques the process of the folding and the lock-in all of that is very very similar but you're battling this additional element of the yeast rising throughout the entire process so it does make it a little bit trickier i will recommend if you haven't watched our first episode on puff pastry that is a great primer a great place to start but if you're ready to dive into all things yeast raised puff pastry let's get baking i'm so excited for this episode because after our first puff pastry episode we got so many requests saying what about croissants what about croissants there are so many things you can make with yeasted puff pastry you can make croissants chocolate croissants ham and cheese croissants you can make danish galore you can make queen aman you can make cruffins you can make bread and rolls there are so many possibilities and of course we're gonna talk about as many of them as we possibly can in this episode there are also a lot of advantages to yeasted puff pastry the shaped pastries can be frozen which makes them really adaptable this is a lot of work to go through but it's a great thing that you can do ahead and have those great yeast raised puff pastries whenever you want as always we'll go through the process we'll go through all the equipment we'll go through what mistakes could happen and how to fix them and we're going to go through tons of shaping and baking tips but first if this sounds like something you'd be interested in or if you've loved past episodes of bake it up a notch do me a favor and please click like and subscribe so you can be made aware of new episodes when they become available let's get baking okay so let's talk about some of the equipment that you need for making yeasted puff pastry of course this is going to be very similar to the equipment that you need to make classic puff pastry but there are a few additional things and mainly for me that comes in the different shaping methods as well so we'll talk about all of that one of the main things that you are going to need in my opinion an electric mixer makes this recipe a whole lot easier this particular dough is an enriched dough which means it has enrichments like milk butter and things that kind of will weigh the dough down a little bit these items feed the yeast but they also kind of slow its activity by mixing the dough a little bit more we use the dough hook to get a nice smooth even dough and the dough hook is really going to be kneading the dough for us it is possible to make this dough by hand but it's a pretty intensive kneading process which is why i like to recommend the electric mixer i also have a paddle attachment because i mix my butter block in the mixer some people mix a butter block a different way we're going to talk about that when we get there but i like to mix it almost like i'm making a cookie dough with the paddle attachment after you get your dough and butter block mixed it's all about the handling and kind of the shaping of the dough so one of the first things you're going to need is a rolling pin in front of me i have three different styles of pins i have one french style pen this is what i typically use for most things it's just usually my preference it's what feels good in my hands i've talked before and bake it up a notch how hand tools are really personal so if it feels good to your hands that's really what you should be using some people i know really prefer rolling pins with handles typically i don't but i actually have been baking so much uh puff pastry in the last couple of days that my hands have started to feel sore from using my french pen repeatedly so today i'm actually going to be using a pin with handles and that's sort of new for me i don't typically do that on bake it up a notch so i wanted to point it out and also say that that's another reason why hand tools are personal because today it feels a lot easier on my hands and also in addition there are pins with handles that don't rotate like this one that's another good choice because it gives you something to grip on but is still you know kind of the middle ground between a pin with handles and a french style pin so all of those are great use what feels best for you i'm also going to recommend some hand tools like my favorite the bench scraper it's really useful for helping keep our edges squared off helping us get a nice lock in all of these things that we're going to be trying to get also for dividing the dough and as always cleaning our surface off we're going to use offset spatulas to help make our butter block and sometimes they're useful in the shaping those are sitting on some parchment-lined baking sheets as always we can use baking sheets to bake our pastries we're also going to use parchment a little bit in the process of making the pastry dough itself i use it to line the baking pans for what i'm baking them on but i also use it to help shape the butter block store the butter block so it's really a helpful tool to have when it comes to shaping there's actually a few other things here in front of me i've got a loaf pan i've got a muffin pan and i have these pastry rings these are sometimes also called english muffin rings or biscuit rings things of that nature all of these things are options for baking your yeasted puff pastry so if you bake it in a muffin pan sometimes it's called a cruffin if you bake it in a loaf pan obviously it's become a loaf of bread and these pastry rings are typically used for queen amman they can be used when you're trying to get a little bit more of a perfect rounded shape so any kind of mold any kind of baking pan you have this is one of the great ways you can get creative with yeasted puff pastry is the shaping and make beautiful exciting shapes we've got pretty much all of the equipment we're going to need in front of us let's get started on the ingredients and what we're going to need to make the dough i forgot one um which is the pastry wheel which is very important the pastry wheel is used for cutting the dough in a lot of different shapes so i'm going to use it when i cut croissants whether i'm making kind of a stuffed croissant like a chocolate croissant or the classic crescent shape i'm going to use it to cut strips to make my cruffins so it's just a great tool of course you can also use a knife or a bench knife but this is nice and makes easy work of it so before we launch into how to make yeasted puff pastry let's talk about exactly what it is because i've already done an episode of bake it up a notch on puff pastry one of my favorites but that's a different kind of puff pastry when you're making classic puff pastry it is just a regular plain dough when you're making this kind of puff pastry when making croissants danish queen aman we're talking about a yeasted dough as the base how this works is you make your dough you let it rise as you would a typical yeasted dough then you make your butter block that's what i've got here wrapped in some parchment when you make the butter block you actually lock that into your yeasted dough you make sure it's fully encased in dough then you start rolling it out and performing a series of folds these folds start creating layers of dough butter dough butter dough butter and just like classic puff pastry these layers mean beautiful rise flakiness crispness wonderful things but unlike classic puff pastry which is very crisp we also get this lightness of a yeast raised pastry which is really just wonderful and that's what we're getting all those beautiful layers and that honeycomb effect that is really desirable the way we achieve that is all those layers of dough and fat in the oven it enters a hot oven and the moisture inside the butter turns into steam and that steam sort of pushes the dough up and this happens as the yeast dough is rising they call that oven spring the moments when the yeast first starts to rise and then the structure of the dough becomes set the outside is crispy and shattery and the inside is fluffy and layered and just gorgeous so we love puff pastry around these parts because it's also so incredibly versatile so the yeasted puff pastry has the advantage of being really make ahead friendly there are some ways that you can freeze the assembled pastries and that's good because this is a lot of work i wanted to talk a little bit about the process and the layering and how that effect happens because this is a project that you're about to tackle but it's an incredibly worthwhile one because these pastries are at their absolute best when eaten fresh from the oven i actually made here my chocolate variation of the puff pastry and this chocolate variation has a little bit of cocoa powder in the dough i also have a chocolate puff pastry in my first cookbook the fearless baker that uses chocolate in the butter block also but in this case i didn't put chocolate in the butter block i just put it in the dough so that we could see all the layers of the lamination it's a little bit easier to see in the chocolate dough than it is with a regular dough because it is a similar color to the butter but with the chocolate dough we can see all the layers of dough butter dough butter we made all these layers i'm so excited to turn it into a delicious flaky pastry but this is what your you know your hard work gets you is all of this beautiful layers which rises so beautifully in the oven and this is what we're gonna try to achieve now so just like so many yeasted doughs one of my favorite things about yeasted puff pastry is that you do not need very many things to make it happen we've got the ingredients for the dough right in front of us the first one we've got is bread flour and some recipes for yeasted puff pastry are going to call for all purpose and it is possible to make croissants danish all kinds of delicious pastries with all-purpose based yeasted puff however bread flour has a higher protein content and therefore more strength so with all of these folds we're putting it through it's just going to give it a little bit more elasticity i find it is an easier dough to work with and produces better results the next ingredient we've got is sugar a little bit of granulated sugar that's one of the things that is used for helping to kind of enrich this dough and it's part of also what makes this dough really supple and soft on the inside the next ingredient we've got is milk this is whole milk unlike other yeast dough recipes this recipe we're actually kind of trying to slow down its overall rise so as a result we are using cold milk in this dough rather than warming it up rather than using warm water from the tap you know it doesn't have to be right from the fridge it can kind of be sitting at room temperature for a little bit but we don't necessarily need to warm this liquid up in any way and it's another enrichment it's something that's going to make this dough soft and the proteins in the milk also help to evenly brown these pastries which they always get so beautifully golden brown our next ingredient is of course salt because we can't have any kind of flavorful anything without salt we need that salt in there and we've also got active dry yeast this is an important ingredient obviously because we're making a yeasted dough there's a good amount of yeast in here enough that we can kind of get a good rise but we also don't add so much that it's kind of rising faster than we can do all of these folds and deal with it so that's the kind of tricky balance with the yeast in this recipe is battling the dough throughout and our final enrichment in this recipe is a little bit of butter this adds to the elasticity of the dough and it also is going to help it brown help it have some really good flavor of course we're adding a whole lot more butter in the butter block later but these are the ingredients we're going to need for the dough and the dough is actually very quick and easy to come together so we're going to add our flour into the mixer bowl we've got a dough hook on the mixer bowl right now also add our sugar our yeast and our salt i'm gonna give that a mix just to combine those dry ingredients for a moment so i'm gonna add this butter a little bit at a time and start to incorporate it with the dough hook on just a low speed and what we're doing here is um we're also giving the dough a little bit of added pliability these enrichments are just going to keep the dough kind of soft and supple and they also do slow down the rise time as i mentioned enriched joes take a little bit longer to rise naturally so that is actually a bit in our benefit because we have all these folds to perform we don't want this dough rising more than then we're ready for once the butter is incorporated a little bit and we've got kind of little chunks going on we're going to start adding our milk and we're just going to go ahead and add it all like i said this is not room temperature milk it is you know lightly chilled milk it's been sitting out for just a little bit here and because we are going to let this dough rise in the refrigerator overnight we don't have to use a hot liquid this is also something that i talk about in my article on food 52 about how you can slow down or speed up yeast rise times in this recipe we want to be able to control that rise time so that we can perform all the folds we need to fold we're going to start mixing this on kind of a low speed until the dough comes together and kind of a shaggy mass around the dough hook for about three minutes on low speed then we'll raise the speed up to medium high and we'll mix it for three minutes more until it's fairly smooth it's not that exciting it will be later though all right so when the dough is all done it looks pretty smooth like this and it should be well hydrated but not overly sticky to the touch in fact later when we're rolling out this dough sometimes i don't even need to use that much flour when rolling it out it's like a really dreamy consistency to work with so i'm just going to form it into a bit of a ball we're going to put the dough into a greased bowl that's at least going to let it double in size it can be even a little bigger than that we're going to put this into the refrigerator and let it rise overnight it's going to need at least 8 hours up to 10 hours and you really don't want to push it too much longer than that if you don't have to because again that yeast is rising from the moment we start to hydrate this dough but we're doing everything we can to slow it down we're using cooler liquid we're letting it rise in the refrigerator and we're going to keep returning it to the fridge throughout the process now in the refrigerator obviously the rise is very slowed down in the morning you're not going to see like a humongous dough risen in your fridge it's going to be just slightly puffier so i'm going to go ahead and cover this dough and of course i already have some that i've had resting overnight we'll bring it out and show you and then we're going to focus on the butter block what we're going to lock inside this beautiful dough so here is some of the dough that has risen overnight and you can see obviously how much more real estate these are not the exact same size of bowl but how much more real estate it's taking up in this bowl and that it looks visibly puffier and it's about double in size in fact i'm gonna take this one away to the refrigerator really quick and we'll start working with this one so once the dough has risen overnight it's just this beautiful spongy texture it's really lovely to work with you can use flour if you need but as you can see it's it's pretty pliable and not overly sticky so i'm kind of deflating it a little bit with my hands and i'm also using my hands to stretch it a little bit to get some of the thicker parts from the center another tool i sometimes bring in is the bench scraper because you can use it to help you square off the edges kind of as a straight edge and then when you do that you're going to see that the dough is a little uneven again there are going to be thicker parts in the center so we can just kind of stretch those up and we're basically going to roll the dough out to be twice the size of what our butter block is so if you have already assembled your butter block you can use that even as a guide otherwise our butter block is going to be six inches by nine inches so what we want it to be is twice as long as our butter block but only a little bit wider so it's going to be 10 by 12 is what we're going for with this dough this is my kitchen specific measuring tape but i am using this because we have several things today that you have to roll out to like 24 inches and it's annoying to have a yardstick in the kitchen okay i've got 12 by almost wide enough one of the things sometimes i think that people think about when they're rolling out when they're worried about getting it to the right size is um you know sometimes they get it to the right length but then it's not the right width and one of the things that you can remember is that you can just enlist that stretching to help you with that also like this only needed to be a little bit wider so rather than rolling it out a bunch more i can stretch it because of course rolling it out is going to continue to elongate it but my length is about right so just remember make the dough work for you okay we are there i'm just going to transfer this i can fold it to transfer it make it a little bit easier i'm going to put this into the refrigerator while i make my butter block and get it ready for the lock in [Music] all right so we're going to go ahead and make our butter block it depends kind of on when you make it sometimes i make the butter block right after i make the dough and kind of reserve it for when i'm ready to assemble so if you do that like i am today i didn't even wash out my dough bowl because it's fairly clean from the dough kind of scraping up all the bits so i'm using just the same bowl but with the paddle attachment i'm adding one pound a whole pound did i mention it's a pound of butter so i've added four sticks one pound of unsalted butter into our mixer and again not everybody uses a mixer to make their butter block some people actually lay the sticks of butter out and use a rolling pin to kind of smash them to get them to adhere to one another i'm very particular about my butter block so i like to have complete control in order to have complete control of it you really need the butter to be at room temperature really flexible and easy to work with i also think that it makes it easier to get the butter at the final ideal texture which is chilled but pliable we're going to talk about this a lot in this episode basically what you're going for is you want the butter to be chilled enough to be firm but not so firm that it isn't bendy and pliable and that's how we're going to get the elasticity and the pliability in our dough to roll it out and make all of these folds over and over and over again the other reason i like to mix my butter block in a mixer is because i add one other ingredient i add some bread flour to it this is something i learned in pastry school from the pastry chefs that taught me how to make yeasted puff pastry and i find that it gives it a little bit of increase i'm using these words a lot but a little bit of increased elasticity to just give it a little bit more stretch and stability i also find that it's kind of this little bit of a protection of the butter melting out of the pastry which is something that can happen with unexperienced yeasted puff pastry makers so just gonna mix these until these two are combined fully combined it doesn't need to mix for a long time just until you no longer see dry bits of flour [Music] when i went to culinary school at the culinary institute of america i went to pastry school and there was a bakery on campus that all the pastry students worked in and i really wanted to work on the yeasted puff pastry station but it wasn't called yeasted puff pastry it was called lamination station which i love i like to think about the lamination station so once all the ingredients are combined they'll be kind of fluffy they'll be slightly lightened in color and we're just going to spread it into a rectangle that's six by nine inches six inches wide nine inches long i'm doing this on a piece of parchment paper and you can see i'm kind of doing it towards one end and that's because i like to fold the parchment paper over and store the butter block that way and i find this just incredibly relaxing so i could be here for a minute making this butter block because i really like it it's just like this is my zen what other people get from like i don't know running or something i don't i don't feel that when i run but i feel it when i spread butter into perfect rectangles okay let's measure it getting close look at that [Music] beautiful okay i'm done i could really do this for way too long and we've definitely accomplished it once you get it to the almost perfect point you can actually use this parchment paper to help you do the final kind of squaring off which is something else i like to do so for that we're just going to fold the parchment paper over the butter block like this press it down firmly then you can actually use the paper to help you press the sides and kind of square them off and then you just end up with this like perfect little butter packet that i love okay oh i guess i should finish talking about it not just walk away hold on i've got something more to say so once you've got your butter block like this you're going to want to chill it and that chilling point is kind of a careful point we want it to be firm but pliable so one of the things you can do like i said you can mix this butter block and prepare it like this right after you make the dough you can mix the butter block and just hold it in your refrigerator overnight and then a few hours before you're gonna do the lock in maybe an hour before you pull it and then just kind of keep checking on it does it feel too soft it'll depend on how warm your house is is it summer and your house is a little bit warmer is it winter and it's especially cold and if it's cold at room temperature it might need a little bit longer to get to that pliable state if it's particularly warm in your house it might only need a few minutes at room temperature to get to that state so remember it can be flexible it can go in the fridge out of the fridge up until that point of the lock-in to get to that chilled but pliable state for now into the fridge it's going to go and i'll grab another butter block i made earlier now we are ready for the crucial point we are ready for the lock-in and the lock-in is what we call kind of putting that butter block inside the dough we're locking it in so a couple of different things i've talked already about how these steps can kind of be done at different points if you made your butter block after the overnight rise of the dough it'll only need to rest for a little while and you could roll out your dough during that time and not need to put your dough back in the fridge there are a lot of options here based on how you're timing it for yourself but the most important thing are kind of these visual cues of size i just love using parchment in this way you can really use parchment paper to help us transport dough lifting it on and off and all of those things in fact i think i need a little bit of bench flour i'm sorry after telling you i was ready once again i am not ready okay here's our flour we'll need a little bit i'm just going to put a little bit of flour on my work surface i find that sometimes you don't really need hardly any flour when working with this dough so see we can just use the parchment paper to help us move things around and i love it so the first thing we're going to want to do we want to have one of the shorter sides of the dough facing us so our 10 inch wide piece should be facing us and the first thing we're going to want to do is put our butter block on the dough and make sure we actually have enough dough and this has rested a little bit and shrunk a tiny bit so i'm just going to roll it out just a smidge more [Music] that's looking pretty good so this is another reason why i like to build the butter block on parchment paper because i can use this as a test i can use it to kind of transport the butter block and at every stage we want to ideally keep things as squared off as possible but we also want to keep the dough as even and uniform as possible so we're kind of aiming for both of those things we've got our butter block before i put it in we want to use the butter block when it is chilled but pliable so what i mean by that is i can actually physically bend it in the paper maybe you can see it a little bit better like you can see that i can actually kind of bend it it's got that pliability but it's also chill to the touch which is important so what we're going to do is we're going to place the butter block towards one edge but not right at the edge we want to do it about a half inch up from that base and we're going to just leave the parchment on you can kind of lift up your paper and make sure it's where you want it once you're certain that you've got it exactly where you want it you can just kind of peel that parchment paper away look how neat and tidy it all is so now we're gonna fold it over and when we fold it over like i said we're aiming to have a little bit of excess all around this edge here and we're gonna gently stretch the dough a bit so don't be alarmed if it's not quite big enough because we do want it to be very firmly encased so you can actually just stretch for that last little bit just stretching it and then we're just going to use our fingertips to really firmly press the dough together all around this is one of the other reasons why i like to not use a lot of flour if i don't have to because it makes the dough really easy to adhere together at stages like this so now what we're going to do is we're going to gently lift it off of our work surface and turn it over if there's any excess flour down here we'll kind of brush it away because any excess flour is going to make the dough again not stick onto itself and we're just going to pull that little bit of excess where we pinched the dough backwards and press it onto the back edge of the dough [Music] just like that and we get this like nice little book packet that we turn back over and we've just locked in the dough look at that look how beautiful it is it's beautiful he's gonna have to get the heart eyes out again because i'm just like i love you dough i love you i really do we're going to start rolling it out and do the first fold i should point out though that you do not have to if you feel that at any point during this stage the dough has gotten soft or sticky or the butter felt a little bit soft by the time you locked it in then you could refrigerate this for a little bit of time after the lock-in i'm a pretty fast laminator these days so i'm ready to go with the first fold right from the get-go and the first fold actually let's break this down a minute we got to talk about these folds we got to break it down we talked about this in our original puff pastry episode there are two different kinds of folds we are utilizing there are lots of different ways to make the folds in puff pastry and different people have different techniques anytime you are rolling it out and folding it you're creating layers so all of those methods work this is my particular method that i was taught in pastry school and i just always find make such beautiful layers so our first type of fold is called a four fold it sort of looks like a book with an off-center spine and the second kind of fold is called a three-fold and that's sort of resemblance of putting um folding a business letter to put into a standard envelope they're both very simple and easy to do but we alternate them so the first one we're going to do is the four fold and i formulated this recipe so that our main idea is that we're going to roll it out to about the size of my baking sheet here it's going to be about a half an inch thick there are specific dimensions in my recipe but they're about the size of a baking sheet so 13 by 18 inches and about half an inch thick and i formulated it that way so i wouldn't have to have a ruler at this stage i could just kind of test it with my nearby baking sheet so we're going to just start rolling it out and we're just kind of being gentle because when we roll it out we are trying to flatten the dough but we also want to make sure that we are working well with that butter that's trapped inside we don't want to get anything too soft or have anything be giving us any kind of trouble where that butter could squish out the other thing that we don't want to do is if the dough is too warm the butter could actually kind of just blend into the dough and then we're not going to have those flaky layers when the dough is the right temperature but the butter is a little bit too cold you actually can get this shattering effect inside the dough and we showed that in our first non-yeasted episode of puff pastry here and bake it up a notch and this is what happens when puff pastry gets too cold when you go to roll it out and fold it the butter inside is so cold that it breaks into many pieces so you can see that right here in this dough that is a very discouraging feeling when you get there so i always like to just remind people that things are chilling from the inside out so it's always going to take longer for that center that butter kind of core to get firm than it is for the dough so if you need to chill it because the dough is starting to give you trouble just remember just chill it for long enough until the dough feels right don't chill it for so long that the dough is now rock hard because once the dough is rock hard likely the butter is too another thing that can happen when you're making this puff pastry are like air pockets like i have a bit of an air pocket over here we can pop those when they become troublesome and just whenever you pop it maybe use a tiny bit of water to make sure that the dough has gone back down this particular bubble that i see isn't that problematic yet so i'm not going to worry about him and when you're doing the folds it's another reason why matching the dough up really carefully is very helpful because when the dough is matched up really well you eliminate those air pockets oh see now it's starting to get to be a problem so we're gonna just let that air out i don't think i need any water in this case but if it doesn't seem like it's going to stick you can always add just a little bit of water and remember a lot of the same things that could go wrong with the puff pastry they're the same things we talked about in the classic puff pastry episode so if you're watching this and you're thinking oh gosh this is intimidating i really recommend starting with that kind of puff pastry first it's a lot more forgiving at every single stage because you're not also working with this beautiful soft dough that's kind of you know i mean this dough is alive it's rising every moment that we're working with it so i'm about at the right width i just need to make it a little bit wider sorry i'm at about the right length i need to make it a little bit wider [Music] we've got it pretty well squared off in the corners and what we're going to do is our four fold you're going to kind of start by visually dividing the dough into quarters we're going to take one side of the dough and fold it over itself just about a quarter of the way across the dough so just about that far then we're going to take the rest of the dough from the other side and fold it up to meet it but there should be more dough on this side than there was on the first part that we folded it's like a little bit uneven that's why i say sort of looks like an open book with an uneven spine the spine is kind of favoring one side and then what we're going to do is we're just going to fold it over onto itself again and we've completed our first fold we're gonna cover this dough in plastic wrap and let it chill for anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes this is going to relax the gluten that happened while we were rolling out the dough and it's also going to help the dough and the butter firm up just a little bit to that firm chilled but pliable situation that we're going for so into the fridge it goes [Music] our dough after its first fold chilled for a little bit of time it is now still chilled but it's definitely pliable i've got a little bit of bend when i'm lifting it up it's perfect so i'm going to start the process of rolling it out again about the size of a baking sheet and about a half an inch thick and we're going to do our second fold so when the dough gets about to where you want it it'll be ready for its next full the second fold that we're gonna do is the three fold this is sort of like folding it as if it was a standard kind of piece of paper that you were putting into a standard envelope so we're going to fold the bottom port third of it up about of the third of the way over the dough and then we'll fold the top third over that same piece so you end up with a nice little packet we can stretch the dough again to make sure that we've got our nice squared off edges as best we can we're going to wrap it up and refrigerate it again again to relax the gluten and firm up that dough and that butter after this we're going to do those same two processes again we're going to repeat the first fold chill it and then repeat the second fold they're the exact same folds the exact same dimensions we just need to give it a little bit of time and a little bit of our arm muscles to get it where we want it alright so let's start talking about shaping this dough what i've got here is one quarter of a batch of my yeasted puff pastry and um that's the piece the size that i sort of break off for croissants so when you're working with different kind of shapes it can be helpful to work with a slightly smaller piece and it's also better for the dough because the dough is kind of sensitive as we know so we don't want to start working with too large of a piece and the butter start melting while we're working with it so you can kind of determine how you want to work with it by breaking off pieces like that for some of my other recipes you use a half a piece of the dough at a time and in croissants we use a quarter so the first thing i'm going to do is flatten the dough out a little bit it has been rising while it's been wrapped up tightly in the refrigerator so i just want to make sure i flatten it out a little bit and i'll go ahead and flour my surface a smidge [Music] and we're just going to start to roll it out we're trying to roll this into a rectangle that's nine inches by 12 inches and that's what we're going to use to make our first batch of croissants when you roll out this dough the dough itself is incredibly versatile so you know you could roll out the dough and leave it as a sheet and build kind of a yeasted puff pastry tart you can uh really do lots of things with it and a lot of the pastries that are made with this dough are simply just named for their shape or the ingredients inside so we'll start with a croissant because for me it is one of the most classic one of my favorites and for me i don't know even though every other pastry i've made with yeasted puff things like danish queen amon cruffins they're all delicious but i feel the most sense of accomplishment when i make really beautiful croissant sometimes this first part of the rolling is also about getting the shape to become more rectangular rather than being kind of lopsided when you're working with a dough that's been folded it always has a tendency to feel thicker in some parts than another and so you can just kind of work with that applying pressure as needed okay so now when you're working with croissants the base of the croissant is going to be four inches wide but the shape of the croissant that we're going to cut is actually a triangle so we're going to start by just marking four inch kind of breaks but remember it's going to come to kind of a point up here so we're also going to have a little bit of extra dough over here and a little bit of extra dough on the other side if you're not worried about precision you can sometimes kind of mash those two pieces together to make kind of a bonus croissant but i usually save them and make something that i sometimes call a monkey danish a monkey inspired monkey bread inspired danish that i also we love to make in pastry school at the culinary institute of america so we're going to start this by measuring our four inch little tick marks and it's 12 inches long so we'll get three little tick marks down here to start but we'll actually get five pieces because since we're cutting triangles we'll also get the piece up towards the point so i'm just going to start down here again you can use a straight edge if you want and we're going to cut a triangle shape we'll just reserve this little extra bit then we will cut you can actually measure again up here to give yourself that little guide if you want [Music] perfect i'm going to save these to make us some monkey danish with later one other cut we have to do before we kind of start the actual shaping we're just going to cut a slit about a little bit about an inch maybe a little more at the base in the center of each croissant now we'll just move the dough gently to the side i love shaping croissants i'm so excited to do this okay first step this is a very important step let's start with not an edge piece first step is the stretch so we want to gently elongate this dough by stretching it and you just really gentle is the name of the game because we don't want to squeeze too hard or pull too hard it could tear the dough we just want to gently stretch it then we're going to lay it on our work surface in front of us we're going to take the two end pieces and the corners of these should kind of reach the outside edge of your triangle and from that point you just roll it all the way up making sure it's sitting on the seam you can kind of give it a little bit more of a crescent shape if you want those edges and that's how we shape a croissant so let's shape a few more this part of it the stretch it's like croissant yoga here the croissant is doing a supine twist namaste [Music] all right so once your croissants are shaped you can put them onto a baking sheet like this it's actually one of the things i love about making yeasted puff the shaped pastries can actually be frozen just like this you could put this tray in the freezer freeze it until it's solid store it in an airtight container a zip top freezer bag and then when you're ready take it out thaw overnight in the refrigerator let rise as you would a traditional pastry and bake and you can have a croissant whenever you want you can do all that work when you've got the time and then reap the rewards later but for these croissants i'm going to bake them today so i'm going to cover them with some plastic wrap i'm going to let them rise in a warm place until they are very puffy and we're going to show you some of the tests that we look at for proofing in a little while but we're going to let them almost double in size before we bake them once i get these croissants rising i'm going to start showing you a bunch of other different ways that we can shape yeast and puff pastry dough we're going to do chocolate croissants with my chocolate variations so they're actually double chocolate croissants we're going to do ham and cheese croissants we're also going to do some danish and queen amon we've got a lot of different shapes and things we're going to show how to do so let's get bacon all right up next we're going to show how to shape chocolate croissants i'm actually making mine as kind of double chocolate croissants using my chocolate puff pastry dough so i've got my dough rolled out to eight inches wide by 20 inches long we're going to start by cutting it in half and one thing i will say with this shape in a in a real patisserie they would cut all the edges and make it perfectly flat and uniform and one of the reasons for that is it actually also helps the dough to rise really evenly i just love utilization and i don't want to have any scrap pieces of dough so i'm just going to not do that but you can if you want a more perfect look you would just trim a little bit of this edge off to get a little bit and of course you can save that scrap dough and we're going to talk about some things that you can do with that scrap dough later as well so i'm going to first cut the dough in half across the eight inch way and then we're going to cut it in each side we're getting eight pieces total so we'll cut it in half again and then cut each half once more [Music] okay so now what we're going to do is with each piece of pastry we're going to place two of these little chocolate batons these are something that they sell specifically for chocolate croissants but if you don't have these you can just cut some chocolate you can kind of cut it into little strips from a bar of chocolate or even just some chopped chocolate is okay in the center and we're going to roll it up when it gets to this edge where the seam is we're going to press it over and kind of press down just a little bit gently so that it's sitting flat on that seam and sometimes i also like to just then squish it in on itself a little bit more and then we'll transfer them to a baking sheet when we're done shaping all of them [Applause] [Music] let's make ham and cheese croissants that's actually done the same way same shaping as the chocolate croissants i've got my dough at eight by 20 and i'm just going to cut it first in half horizontally then in half vertically and then cut those halves into quarters i'm going to dollop a little bit of whole grain mustard all right we'll spread that kind of all over the base of course if you're not a mustard fan you can skip this but who is that just kidding i know some people don't like mustard i actually didn't like mustard when i was a kid now i love it then we'll put a little bit of ham in kind of towards the base of each piece then a little cheese or a lot of cheese it's really the amazing thing about this dough it's so versatile you can make so many different shapes you can make sweet you can make savory and then we're just gonna roll it [Music] up [Music] next we're going to shape some danish now danish are a filled pastry that has kind of different fillings or toppings and it can be made in a variety of different shapes ironically in denmark of course they're not called danish but that's what we call them in the states and lots of other places around the world kind of a filled yeasted puff pastry or a topped yeasted puff pastry so i'm going to start with a 16 by 16 inch piece of dough i'm going to cut it in half and then each half and half as well we're going to do that the other direction as well ending up with 16 pieces [Music] now you can really make all different kinds of shapes with danish and there are really simple ones and more complex ones i have an article on food 52 that shows a lot of really simple danish shapes um and i think it has nine of them in fact so that's a great jumping off point if you want to see some different danish shapes i'm just going to show you a couple of my most used ones today one of the simplest shapes that you can do is to just kind of press an indentation into the dough to kind of mark where you're going to fill it but leave the dough itself pretty much plain otherwise so i'm actually using the ring of a mason jar lid here you can use obviously a cookie cutter but i also like to point this out because i think this kind of recipe everyone always thinks is so fancy and you need a lot of special tools so just a reminder that you could use the bottom of a cup or a mason jar lid or really anything you want we're just gonna press deeply but not all the way through not punching all the way through to make kind of an indentation when this starts to rise it's going to not rise as much where we pressed in that indentation and we're going to be able to put a little bit more filling in there as a result one of my other favorite shapes i call it the diamond kind of it's not really a diamond that's why i say kind of we're gonna cut two lines in the dough kind of making you know two-thirds of a triangle on one edge here and we're going to cut all the way so that we can release this dough what we're going to do then is fold the dough over so that we kind of have a double thickness of dough here and a single thickness here and this is where our filling is going to go oh this one's fun this is one of the most fun ones but it's actually really easy for this one we're going to cut kind of at all the corners and we're going to cut about an inch and a half or so into the dough then we'll take one of those corners and bring it in towards the center we're making kind of a pinwheel shape and we'll keep doing that with one of the edges all the way around love this one and then the filling is going to go right in the center after it rises [Music] all right next we're gonna make one of my absolute favorites this is queen aman which is sort of a sugar crusted yeasted puff pastry and um i was saying i think it kind of is like the palmier of yeasted puff pastry because you are gonna actually roll it in some sugar so when i get almost to the size i need which is eight by twenty four i'm gonna sprinkle it with some sugar you can actually sprinkle it with sugar kind of throughout the process and this sugar i'm using you'll notice it's not white sugar i'm actually using maple sugar to give this like a really delicious mapley flavor so we'll just roll it in to get it nice and crusted in you can kind of do that on both sides then we'll cut it in half [Music] and then we are going to cut it into 12 even no yeah 12 even pieces 12 even pieces lovely so what we're going to use for these to shape is our pastry rings that i talked about in the equipment section the pastry rings or sometimes they're called english muffin rings they're going to kind of hold the pastry in shape and make this incredibly beautiful um kind of more precise shape however you can also make these a little bit smaller and make them in a classic muffin pan you'll want to make them three by three inches instead of four by four inches or you can make them exactly like this in a jumbo muffin pan so that's another option if you don't have those pastry rings so what we're going to do i'm just going to put a little water with my finger in the very center and we're going to fold all of the corners of the pastry in onto itself and pinching fairly tight to seal in the center this little pastry package and we'll just drop that right into our little so it's actually a very easy shape just folding the corners in and it makes it of course we're making kind of extra layers when we do this so as this rises it's going to be even flakier than some of the other pastries we made which is part of what makes it so special [Music] next up let's talk about cruffins which is basically taking your croissant your yeasted puff pastry dough and taking advantage of all those layers and making it into more of a muffin-shaped pastry or a cruffin as it were so what's cool about this technique is it also applies to two existing recipes i have on the food 52 site already which are my croissant rolls and my croissant loaf which are made in a very similar technique where the dough is cut into strips and rolled up and put into a pan what's different about these is that these are spiced cruffins so we're actually going to start after we get it to the right size here 12 by 20 inches we're going to brush it all over with egg wash and my egg wash is just one large egg and a little bit of water to thin it out but you can also use milk in your egg wash you can add a pinch of salt if you want we're just gonna brush it all over and then we're gonna sprinkle our spiced sugar really generously over it and the egg wash is going to help it stay in place and of course this sugar mixture i have it it has cinnamon and cardamom and all sorts of good stuff in it but you could really have this mixture be a great place to get creative have it be anything you want we used maple sugar for our queen of man so you could really go crazy here [Music] god it smells so good it's so like a candle better than a candle because i'm gonna get to eat it [Music] so now we're gonna cut it into one inch strips across the 12 inch direction and you should get about 12 pieces or not about you should get 12. then we're gonna roll up these little strips and put them right into a greased muffin [Music] pan [Music] so this last danish isn't really a danish shape at all but it's something that i learned in pastry school we used to take all the scrap pieces of yeasted puff pastry and chop them and use them to make kind of a monkey bread inspired danish that we call monkey danish so we've got a few different monkey danish options here so we're just gonna cut them into bite-sized pieces it's totally fine if they're uneven in fact they don't need to be perfect then what we're gonna do is we're gonna grab a baking sheet in pastry school we made these by just free form arranging some of the dough and kind of pressing it together a little bit in just like random shapes like this and that's how i like it best but you can give it a little bit of elegance by making it in a mold in a muffin pan or using our pastry rings like we did for the queen of on and it'll make a little bit more pristine of a look with straight edges you can finish these almost any way you would finish a danish because as these rise they're kind of going to fill in those gaps a little bit but i do recommend egg washing them and sprinkling a little cinnamon sugar that sugar or it can be just regular sugar too or any kind of spice sugar but that sugar that we sprinkle over with the egg wash is going to help all those pieces kind of stick together so that it won't totally crumble apart when you go to eat it they'll kind of caramelize and kind of act as a delicious caramely glue so these are perfect they can get risen and filled with cheese filling fruit filling whatever you want and baked [Music] one of the things that's very different about yeasted puff pastry than classic is that it requires proofing because it is a yeasted dough so i know proofing is really a tricky thing for a lot of people we have some great the oven's ready in our yeast episode of bake it up a notch we have some really great examples of proofing where we show under proofing and over proofing but i also did a couple croissants here today because with enriched doughs and laminated enriched doughs in particular it can take a very long time for them to proof once being shaped especially because you're usually chilling the dough so much at every stage so just a reminder that it's really going to take a decent amount of time if it's nearing the right proof level and you want to slow it down remember that the refrigerator is your best friend you can put it in the refrigerator and it's going to slow down the process of the dough proofing so in front of me i have an under proofed a just right and an over proofed croissant and there's a few different things that you can see about it in its raw state for one obviously the size these were all the exact same weight of dough um when i started this process and you can see obviously this one is much puffier this one's a little bit puffier and this one is still pretty small the other thing that you're going to notice is this texture when you touch it on an under proofed pastry when we press in it's either going to leave no indentation at all or the indentation is going to immediately spring back in an overproof dough it's going to leave the indentation and hold it there it's never going to bounce back in a properly proof dough it will hold the indentation briefly and then slowly spring back so that finger test is what we're looking for to ensure that we get the right proof once they're properly proofed they're ready to be finished and baked when you bake an overproofed pastry what ends up happening to it is it often collapses so it is no longer it basically rises but it it doesn't it's already risen too much before baking so it has nowhere else to go in the oven and just collapses an under um risen pastry is going to be very dense and it's just not it's gonna maybe even look okay from the outside but when you cut into it it's gonna have a very different look on the inside theoretically a properly baked one will have a really nice beautiful texture on the inside and be the right size and shape as well let's talk about finishing yeast raised puff pastry there are lots of different ways and probably the most simplest is something i call for a lot in a lot of my recipes egg wash just an egg beat with a little bit of water and that's all you're going to use on something like a croissant but then you also have other options you can always finish things with sanding sugar pearl sugar sprinkles you know there are lots of different things you can do but when it comes to danish we're not just gonna egg wash and add a little sprinkle of something we also need to add a filling or maybe even two fillings or three fillings so i've got all of my danish that i shaped earlier the first thing we're gonna do is egg wash them all over and while i have all these different shapes in front of me because we cut all of these danish to approximately the same size it's okay to bake different shapes together but it is important to remember that like something like this pinwheel is gonna maybe take a little bit longer because it has then than this because it has thicker pieces of dough it's totally fine to bake them together but one of the things i do is i recommend putting the thicker ones towards the center of the baking sheet that way as they bake you know everything is kind of on the outside edge tends to get a little bit browner faster if you put those thicker ones towards the center it'll also be easy to take away any if you need to and let the others keep baking so i egg washed all of our danish and we're just gonna make a couple of different shapes um i'm sorry shapes no we're gonna use a couple of different fillings to make these and i have kind of a basic cream cheese filling the main danish recipe that i'm including with this episode is a cinnamon crumb danish it's just one of my favorites but it has a cream cheese filling a cinnamon filling and a streusel topping you can also mix and match any of those to just have a cheese danish or you can add some jam and have a fruit and cheese danish so we'll do a couple of different options here just make sure when you're doing this that you aren't tempted to over fill because you know too much filling is going to just slide right off your pastry so you just want to keep kind of just just the right amount here's that cinnamon crumb topping and also a good handful of streusel oh yes is that too much truesil no just gonna do it [Music] anyway when your danish are all filled or topped and egg washed or your croissants are egg washed they are ready for the oven you want to add fillings and finishes like this right before you're baking after they've risen just right and they've proved exactly how you want them don't try to add fillings or toppings like this before proofing because they can have some negative effects so just apply them and have your oven preheated and ready to bake when you're making yeasted puff pastry there are a few different mistakes that can happen and a lot of them are really easily preventable there are also some things that can happen earlier in the process like the butter being too cold and shattering inside the dough or the butter being too warm and melting inside the dough we talk about a lot of those in our first classic puff pastry episode so go back and refer to those for some tips and advice because the same sort of stuff applies and i want to focus on some things that are more specific to yeasted puff pastry so the first one has to do with proofing we talked a lot about proofing and kind of the visual cues to look for i went ahead and baked those three i had the under proofed the properly proofed and the overproofed the first thing that i want to point out is that the properly proved and the over proofed look about the same after baking and that's because this was so over proved it didn't have anywhere to rise and at a certain point it just stopped it didn't exactly collapse but also the point where i pressed it with my finger where the indentation stayed left a mark in this dough so that is one thing that happened you can see that the other one is really small but what you can this is the under proofed one what you're really going to be able to see is when i cut into it it still has flakiness but it is incredibly dense compared to the others it's not as light the honeycomb is really tight in the center rather than having spread out a little bit more and all the pastries are going to be dense in that way here's another example you've got a better proofed chocolate croissant and one that was under proofed and therefore it was actually really difficult to cut it looks a lot shorter let's cut into our overproofed croissant we have a lighter honeycomb but as you can see when i cut into our properly proofed we've literally got the exact same height and that's because this was over proofed so it had nowhere to go so it could have even this one maybe even could have gotten a little bit more proofed a little bit lighter we've got that nice light honeycomb and it's not dense and tight and that's really the main difference you can see it in the size here and you can see it in the cross section another one of the most common mistakes that i see is under baking these products i actually like to take an internal temperature of these using a thermometer and i list internal temperature recommendations on all the recipes included in this episode typically you're going to want it to be at least 190 degrees but it can actually go up over 200 degrees in the center and it's a great way to tell because sometimes especially these pastries look really golden and brown and beautiful on the outside but on the inside they are not done and when they're not done one of the things that will happen is it will collapse after baking so this is one of my croissant rolls that after baking it was taller than this when it came out of the oven and it just kind of collapsed i'm going to cut into it and it's probably going to look a bit yeah oh yeah let's cut into this one too just because i want to see but yeah we've got a perfect exact line of raw dough in the center of this and that's because these were under baked by only about five minutes so that is the difference that it's going to take for that last little bit of dough and it's going to give you that last little bit of lift that last little bit of support and finish that beautiful honeycomb shape the other thing that can happen is unevenness of dough and i talked about this a little bit when i was shaping i was saying that i don't really care if the ends are perfectly square that's a personal preference for me i just don't care but it is really important that the dough is even in thickness because if it isn't even in thickness it can affect the way that the pastry rises the way it bakes and even the doneness some parts might be under baked when the rest of it is done so i have a couple of examples in front of me this is a good one because on this croissant the um top edge was much thicker than the rest of the pastry and as a result when we wrapped it over the weight of it as it rose it kind of popped out even though we shaped it so that it would be under it popped out and it ruined the shape of this pastry similarly this was an uneven thickness and it unrolled itself and it's a better example of an unrolled croissant because nobody wants a croissant that looks like this necessarily and then here's a great example with a ham and cheese croissant still delicious and even like from this side it looks pretty good like ooh but then you see on this side it's actually become kind of unfurled and that caused this particular croissant i can feel it in the bottom to bake unevenly and the center of this croissant is a little under baked but it couldn't have stayed in the oven any longer the rest of it was baked beautifully but because of the shaping it was off i'm sorry i talked this camera the whole time just got excited but because of the shaping this was off and it unrolled itself and it also baked unevenly as a result yeah so see it should still be baked down here but we've got unbaked dough all around the ham so we've got unbaked dough down here unbaked dough up here so all of these mistakes are preventable watch the thickness of your dough when you're rolling it out be careful and conscious when you're proofing and be sure to bake carefully bake all the way through take that internal temperature and you're gonna end up with your best yeasted puff pastry yet [Music] thank you so much for joining me for this episode of bacon up a notch where we dove deep into yeasted puff pastry this is the episode of my dreams because now we get to eat all of these delicious items that are so flaky so crispy but i also hope that this episode really encourages you to tackle a baking project that you maybe weren't sure that you ever would especially with the ability to freeze these croissants this makes a really fun project to tackle and not just the croissants really any of these pastries it's a really fun project to tackle freeze some bake some for now freeze some for later and just keep enjoying the pastry fruits of your labor for many months to come so thank you so much for joining me i hope you learned a lot we talked about all those mistakes we talked about everything you're going to need to know to make these for yourself if you're making your own yeasted puff be sure to share your bakes with us tag food52 tag me on social media we want to see those bakes use bake it up a notch a reminder that all of these delicious recipes can be found on food 52 they also are linked in the description of this video below be sure to click like and subscribe so that you are aware when new episodes become available every month and we will see you next time happy baking boom

Channel: Food52

Views: 411,650

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, erin jeanne mcdowell, erin jeanne mcdowell croissants, how to make croissants at home, croissants recipe, croissant recipe, ham and cheese croissants, chocolate croissant recipe, double chocolate croissant, cruffins, how to make croissants from scratch, yeasted puff pastry recipe, croissant loaf, croissant rolls, kouign amann, how to make yeasted puff pastry, erin jeanne mcdowell puff pastry, bake it up a notch

Id: bNHpp71MFRQ

Length: 69min 20sec (4160 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021