Make Perfect Croissants With Claire Saffitz | NYT Cooking

i i want to get one thing out of the way before we start talking about croissants which is that i'm going to refer to these as croissants for the rest of this video and not croissant okay because i can't i can't do that every time so excited hey everyone i'm claire saffits and today i am showing you how to make croissants like the highest achievement in all of pastry gum i don't think i will ever ever get tired of eating these so we're gonna make basic all butter croissants ham and cheese almond croissants panna chocolate there's nothing better than a freshly baked croissant but then like somehow it gets better when you add chocolate and ham and cheese i really want to encourage people to try this at home because it's fascinating and fun and challenging and like you might get obsessed like i did and just make them like 15 times in a row for this recipe i became like a woman possessed about making croissants i made them at least a dozen times at home and there is so much to learn now i'm very like attuned to the flaws in the recipes that i make but even at my worst batch they were still so delicious you can get very very good results at home like i've never had a bigger thrill than when i pulled out eight beautiful golden like puffy gorgeous layered croissants from my oven croissants are in a category of pastry called vienwazuri and generally speaking these are pastries that are something called laminated so laminated is kind of a technical jargony pastry term for a layered pastry butter is rolled into dough rolled out and folded and rolled out further and this creates a series of sheets of butter separated by layers of pastry and that is what creates this layered crispy effect in things like puff pastry and danishes and of course croissants there's just so much to talk about in this recipe if i were editing this video this would be like a four hour video so in order to adjust the recipe so that you are able to have freshly baked croissants before noon we do this over two days so this is like perfect for a weekend baking project where you'll do the majority of the work on a saturday and then sunday morning you wake up you form the croissants let them rise and bake them on day two the first step for making croissants is to make something called the ditch home and that is the dough that we're using that's gonna enclose the butter for our lamination i'm gonna say this at every single point in this recipe this step is very important and you need a strong dough to support all of those layers of butter and to not collapse when you bake it in general if you can find a flower between 11 and 13 protein that's a good selection something in that range that's what i recommend now i gotta talk about yeast again so many things to talk about i'm using acne dry yeast because for people at home that's by far the easiest kind to find almost every recipe that i've made with active dry yeast i'll tell you to activate the yeast or proof it which basically means dissolving it in a warm liquid 99 times out of 100 your yeast is alive and it's fine i'm pretty confident that you can just mix it right into the dough i've never had a problem doing that at home it's 12. 120 grams of whole milk the first thing i want to do is hydrate everything and do an initial mix so i'm going to start by just mixing this on low so this is going to look dry and shaggy but let the mixer go for a few minutes and it will come together so here we have our initial mix of the dough it like looks kind of like a cauliflower it's not smooth it doesn't really have any elasticity to it you can see it just breaks but that's okay we want to now let it rest i want to give time to the proteins and the flour to hydrate this is going to help us to develop the right amount of gluten that we want my butter pieces here are cold which is important and i'm going to add these to the mixer this is the part where it's more helpful to have the mixer with a dough hook by hand it's really the step of adding the butter that's a little bit more challenging to do so i'm happy to let the mixer take care of it a nice slow mix though is the one of the keys to the right texture of dough the dough has transformed you can see what a different texture it is it's completely absorbed the butter it's much stretchier it's a very very smooth and supple dough and that's what we want it extends easily and seamlessly envelops the butter and here's a great tip so this is something that i picked up in culinary school i'm going to cut a slash in one direction and then a slash in the other direction basically reoriented the gluten strand so that as it rises this will expand and then i'll have an easier time forming it into a rectangle which is the shape that we need for the lamination and i'm going to let this sit at room temperature until it's about 50 percent expanded in size so one and a half times and then we're going to transfer to the fridge and let it chill and finish a nice long slow rise for a few hours all right butter now we're going to talk about butter the flavor of croissants is butter so that's where you want to go for the highest quality stuff you can find the recipe calls for european or european style butter that designation means that there's a higher percentage of butter fat butter should have some plasticity which means the ability to bend without breaking or snapping kerrygold has that even when it's cold and as we get into the lamination i'll explain why that's really important just going to sort of loosely fold up the parchment paper and i have this kind of loose packet and i'm going to use my rolling pin to lightly beat the butter i don't want to like in order to soften it without warming it up and make it pliable i cannot imagine that my neighbors loved hearing this noise day in and day out but then i would at least bring them croissants the next day so just this part's a little noisy and now i want to focus on getting very clean straight sides and i'm making a very level block of butter somewhere around an 8 inch square a little bit bigger is fine i would say there's like a surprising number of recipes where i call for a ruler and i'm not i'm not trying to bug you or like the reason i'm calling for in the recipe is because i think if you use it it will make your life easier down the road like it like a present you can see that i've folded the parchment into a square the butter is smaller than the parchment and i'm going to beat it again to fill in all of those spaces and at a certain point you'll be able just to roll without beating it so i'm going to just move to a rolling motion and force the butter into any places within the square where there's an air gap you can see that let this firm up in the fridge while the ditch finishes its rise i have a swap it has finished its rise in the fridge and is now cold and is basically about doubled in size so i'll show you what this looks like you can see how the dough has expanded and like those four points have become almost like corners now so that's going to make it easier to form into a rectangular shape and there's just a quick kind of intermediate step that i want to do before we move on to lamination and that is actually getting this into the freezer the steaks get higher when we incorporate the butter we have to control fermentation of the dough and that just means that it becomes very important to control temperature and to keep the dough very very cold so that the yeast stay very sluggish and calm and they don't produce gases that is going to make it a lot harder to roll out if anyone has a great at-home replacement for plastic wrap for this purpose let me know i'm going to actually use a technique similar to the one i used for the butter at this point i have to be i'm not like concerned about thickness or dimensions i just want it to be even i don't want to freeze it solid that's not going to help me when i want to roll it out i just want to get it super super cold and firm so about 20 minutes should be about right all right so the next stage is locking in the butter so it is enveloping the butter in the dough and then i'm going to roll it out and do the folds for the lamination the important thing here is that my dough and my butter are a similar texture and that is going to help the butter to roll out evenly inside the dough and for them to be the same texture i need the dough to be colder than the butter so that's why we had it in the freezer in general i want to go through all the steps of lamination without adding a whole lot of excess flour so i'm going to roll out my dough or detromp into a slab that is basically the same width as the butter block but twice as long you try to maintain at all times your square sides i keep kind of running my hands under it just to make sure that it's not really sticking you can also give it a flip we're looking for butter that can bend but not snap i'm going to place it in the center of my dough and close the butter in the dough by folding the longer sides down into the center of the butter you can do any tugging that you need to in order to even out the thickness of the dough you do not need them to overlap you just need them to meet so you can see i have an even thickness of dough all the way around and now i'm going to pinch along the sides just to prevent the butter from peeking out i've now locked the butter in and i'm going to roll it out and do my first turn i rotated the dough 90 degrees so that seam running down the middle of the butter block is now vertical i'm going to beat the dough to begin to lengthen the slab and also thin out the butter i found that beating it and like paying extra attention to the sides will help keep straight parallel sides so periodically lift it up make sure nothing's sticking now i'm going to go in with my rolling pin and start to roll and i'm going to make a very long narrow slab about two feet long the length isn't as important as the thickness i'm going to go for about between a half and quarter inch thick i'm not pressing down if you press down you risk squeezing out the butter and fusing the dough together you know then you won't have that definition of layers so really it's like an uh a kind of pushing motion outward and toward yourself so this is actually called a double turn we're going to fold the dough in a way that quadruples a number of layers right now i have dough butter dough but when we fold it we multiply the layers of butter in between the dough and that is what gives us the flakiness fold one end of the dough up toward the midline and take the other side of the dough and fold that down and now i'm going to fold the entire thing in half crosswise and this is now called the book so you can see i have now a slab of dough that's four thicknesses one two three four i've now quadrupled the number of layers in my slab this is called the first turn and each time we roll it out and fold those layers get thinner and they multiply at this stage the butter is now warming and the dough is also getting warmer and we've also worked the dough so it's going to want to spring back when i go to roll it out so we want to chill it before we do get another turn maybe a little bit of a rolling out because the thinner it is the faster it will chill down i reserve the plastic from before you can see that it has firmed up quite a bit so i'm going to roll it out and we're going to do the next turn the second and final which is called a simple turn so it's a slightly different orientation than the first beating with the rolling pin it just kind of kick-starts that lengthening process so you might find that you have little air bubbles that's normal that is partly because of the fermentation partly just because you maybe had some air pockets between the dough and the butter you can just go ahead and pop them like dust it with flour and then i wipe the excess off i'm talking a lot but you also want to try to go faster than i'm going [Music] this time we're doing what's called a simple turn where i'm folding it in thirds like a letter so this is just a slightly simpler method just like that you can see that my ends have rounded a little bit which is a very very common problem i'm just tugging on the ends of the slab to try to square them off so this is your second turn a simple turn and your final turn take advantage of the tension against the plastic wrap and use your rolling pin to force it into like a square tape again and to create sharper corners the dough slab has been chilling so it's rested and now the last step on day one of the croissant process is to roll out the dough into a slab kind of like a pre-shaping step it's to get it ready for rolling and forming croissants tomorrow you're going to want to spring back try rolling in the other direction so roll perpendicular to the direction you were going and it should extend that way the dough is starting to resist me a little bit this is a good time to wrap it up again get it back in the fridge and then tomorrow when it's nice and rested we can roll it out if needed to the right dimensions and we're going to cut roll proof and bake our croissants i told you it was a process i know it's a lot but it's worth it we've made the dough we let it rise we enclosed the butter we rolled it out we did the first turn the second turn and then we left it overnight we're getting into the really exciting part where we're nearing the end of the process so we want to create an ideal proofing environment for the croissants this is a really important part of the process because this is what's going to determine how light and airy and flaky your croissants are so we're going to use our oven to create an enclosed area for proofing i have a skillet of water right here i want to get this to an active simmer and i'm going to place it in the oven which is our proofing area then while we form the croissants the water will cool off a little bit and all that steam will make this ideal humid environment just get really nervous about this part um nervous excited let me go grab the dough so i'm going to give this dough a bear dusting of flour i mean the bare minimum if you see any air bubbles go ahead and just pop them be careful when you're moving the dough so that you're not puncturing any of the layers i am ready to start cutting so the first thing i want to do is straighten the shorter sides because i want even size croissants i am measuring and then making little marks with my cutter and now i'm just going to use my ruler and connect those marks on the two longer sides and slice this into four even rectangles these are going to get sliced into eight triangles and each triangle is going to be one crescent what's the word for a right triangle the right triangle is that what if that's called okay so now i have right triangles i want to make these into isosceles triangles so anyone that thinks that trigonometry doesn't help you later in life just think about making croissants gonna kind of eyeball it you end up slicing like a tiny tiny little triangle off the base you don't really have to do this but i think it helps to form more even crescents and also it does expose some of the layers at the base which i like the way that looks in the final crescent i like to give it a gentle tug along the short side also a little tug to lengthen almost like a witch's hat like a little bit of a wider face a long tapered point so you don't want large gaps by any means but you also don't want to be stressing the dough and creating a lot of tension so i let it rest on the point of the triangle and sometimes give it like a little like a little bop like that because i want that point to stick and it's going to rest on the point stick that right on the baking sheet right there and again pour to a sheet these are going to get really big [Music] so i want to go loose on the plastic because these are going to get extremely puffy as they rise and i don't want them to encounter resistance against the plastic i did test freezing these but you could certainly do everything up to this step put the baking sheets in the freezer you can even put them all in one sheet freeze them solid take them out put them in your proofing setup just like we did and let them rise when i tested it that way they took seven hours to proof totally possible and the ones that i froze were like one of the best batches i made we're looking at around the two to two and a half hour mark so i'll check on these see how they're doing and then we'll talk about how do you know when your croissants are approved smiling because i'm very excited so these have been proofing for what was it like it's been a while right three hours two and a half hours okay so two and a half hours so on the long end of the range these are proofed to me they remind me of michelin men they look like they've been inflated a little bit the tools that you have to determine if they're proofed enough they're basically all visual because we do not want to touch these they are super delicate while the oven is preheating i'm going to uncover these and actually stick the trays in the fridge one it's going to slow down the proofing so they don't over proof while the oven preheats and second they are going to firm up in the fridge it's going to make it easier to apply an egg wash carefully carefully uncover them because you don't want to disturb any of the layers and as i uncover them i can show you see how there's a little bit of a wobble on these guys when i gently shake the pan that's an indication that there is lots of gas in these and they are proofed we want a beautiful shiny burnished exterior the best way to get that is to brush it with a mixture of egg yolk and heavy cream basically a half eggshell is a tablespoon this gives you both browning and shine the oven is preheated now we're going to apply the egg wash you don't want to poke the croissants at all they are so puffy and light that they're also on the verge of collapse i don't want to coat the exposed layers in egg because the egg could fuse them together and prevent this kind of separation from happening so i'm only going to coat the smooth top surfaces of the croissant with egg wash i think of in charlotte's web where like toward the end where wilbur is getting brought to the county fair and the farmer's wife base meant buttermilk it's just what this makes me think of i think as a child like that image really stuck with me someone told me to stop fussing with them thank you thank you sometimes i need to hear that okay we're going to the oven thank you okay be gentle be gentle and now don't touch them anyone else just want to like sit in front of this the whole time and watch them oh my god it smells so good if if they could pump this smell into like every open house with every house on the market ever a huge spike in house sales is that things like the challenge of cookies when people try to buy your house or whatever oh that's my timer i'm going to rotate each pan 180 degrees so that what's in the front of the oven is going to go toward the back i'm also going to switch racks so what's on the top it's going to go on the bottom bottom to the top this is just all in service of having all the croissants brown evenly croissant troubleshooting a lot of times you don't know when something has gone wrong in the process until you bake so one thing that happens commonly is the butter leaks out of the croissants and pools on the baking sheet during baking it could be that your croissants got too warm during proofing and the butter just kind of melts out the other thing is your dough could just not be super well rested that's another reason why i like leaving the slab overnight generally one that's flat but like wide like a big footprint but flat means that you over proofed them they just don't grow a whole lot then you then you certainly underproof them you're not having this sort of webbed even interior that's the sign that your butter probably got too soft while you were laminating there's a lot of stuff here it's like a lot of it's just so technical and sensitive throughout the process but they're going to taste great no matter what so i prefer a well done or biancui croissant which i think these are none of this like pale this is too high for me to take this off sorry i think all right here they are let them cool on the baking sheets and then we're definitely gonna cut into these and see this one looks great you can see the spiral there aren't huge air gaps which i'm happy about and i do have somewhat of a honeycomb so i'm really happy with this i think this is a great result for people at home there are a few baked goods that i can think of that hit as many textural notes as a croissant and it is this miraculous combination of extremely rich and very light plus this very toasty shattering exterior like to me it's hard to think of a higher achievement of pastry than a croissant so once you know the whole method and process for making the croissanto it opens you up to being able to make lots of different variations on the classic crescent so i'm going to show you how to do a ham and cheese version and a pano chocolate or chocolate croissant version and we're using the exact same dough the slab is rolled into slightly different dimensions and i'm going to show you how to cut and form them and then they proof the same way the croissants proof so these are called that tong or batone these are designed especially for pena chocolat so i've special ordered these these are really not something you can typically find in any kind of grocery store or even a specialty food store if you don't want to order them you can go ahead and use bar chocolate that we can cut into similar sized bars these bars broke when i was carrying them here but that's okay and i'm just going to slice crosswise and i think it actually is easier if you sort of score it all right so the scoring and breaking method to me you get less breakage that way because obviously chocolate is brittle and it's going to want to break up into different pieces these are slightly smaller so we're going to cut 10 rather than eight this is the dimensions that i want i'm gonna mark three inch widths okay that was weirdly hard but i got it i'll lengthen it a little bit place it about between a half and one inch in from one of the short ends then we are going to wrap the dough around the stick of chocolate and then right where you have this seam you're going to nestle in another stick of chocolate and keep rolling make sure that chocolate is fully inside the dough and then look at how cute that is i'm just going to set up another slab exact same way and show you how to roll in the ham and cheese you could really use any kind of thinly sliced ham from any grocery store in like the deli aisle already packaged that's totally fine this is an emmental you could use swiss cheese you could use gruyere perfect i want to make sure that i'm using something around a half an ounce wow i'm kind of nailing it with these quantities and then leave a little bit of a border along the short end so you can kind of get the spiral going and then just fold they're a little bit like chubbier than the kind of chocolate there you go [Music] so there's all sorts of things you can do with steel croissants to revive them and bring them back and one of my favorite things to do is make all my croissants it's like incredible so they come together pretty fast i'm gonna toast it so usually a frangipane doesn't call for this step but i think it adds a lot of flavor you're not having to make it light and fluffy like you would if you were making a cake that's just not necessary we want it well blended it gets that really intense almondy flavor from extract that really almost um i don't know how to describe it [Music] i'm going to make my rum simple syrup simple syrup is just equal parts water and sugar take it off the heat i'm going to add two tablespoons of dark rum and then i have eight really old i baked these a couple days ago croissants they're kind of sad these this batch i overproof so you can see they're really flat i'm cutting them in half like i was gonna make a sandwich the first thing we're going to do is soak the cut sides of all the halves with the syrup when products like this stale they're losing a lot of the moisture so we are replacing some of that moisture that has been lost and i'm going to take half of this mixture and divide it evenly among the eight bottom halves of the croissants spread the frying pan across the entire surface all the way to the edges the lids go back on top like that yeah the second half of the franja pen goes across the tops you can see this is why i didn't assemble on the baking sheets because i have crazy crumbs and everything and those crumbs would burn [Music] oh god okay i love these [Music] i feel like a baking fairy godmother here to say that like you can do this at home i've never made so many croissants in a 24-hour period as i have here feeling very good about all this so here is my ham and cheese i don't know i don't really use this word but these are kind of transcendent truly i don't know it's hard to even describe like so good this looks like it could come from bakery silky is like to me the word that comes to mind just so good it looks like kind of a meager amount of chocolate but the chocolate is a very very strong flavor so i don't think that it actually ends up being too little chocolate maybe this one's my favorite now i don't know if there is anything that comes close to a freshly baked croissant it's a twice-baked croissant it's amazing to take something which is already so delicious the plain all butter croissant and then to be able to transform it into pastries of this variety where like one is more delicious and the next is incredible it's something you can do and try to perfect for the rest of your life and along the way you're gonna eat like a million delicious croissants and that sounds like an awesome project i just think i'm like i don't know i keep like looking down and get like a little getting a little lost in my thoughts because this is still overwhelming um this swirl is hypnotizing i'm enthralled i hopefully if you try these at home you're also enthralled by the process which is to me nothing short of a miracle baking is a miracle oh my god i need to sit down and drink this coffee you

Channel: NYT Cooking

Views: 2,810,563

Keywords: cooking, cooks, recipes, recipe, how-to, how to, kitchen, new york times, new york times cooking, nyt cooking, nyt, nytimes, croissants, claire saffitz, how to make croissants, how to make croissants at home, baking croissants, how to bake croissants, try this at home, home baking, laminated dough, what is laminated dough, french pastry, how to make french pastry, butter, flour, almond croissant, ham and cheese croissant, chocolate croissant, pan au chocolat, lamination, butter block

Id: vpwY3nmLLaA

Length: 29min 56sec (1796 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Emptymoleskine]

I've really been waiting for this one! When they posted the recipe - the pictures seemed to indicate they had done a video - so I wanted the video right away.