Sourdough Croissants from Start to Finish | Proof Bread

there is never a perfect recipe there is never a perfect product you're only really as good as your last result and if your last result is imperfect well then there is always work to be done so what are we trying to achieve with our croissants right now we're still working on efficiency but we're working on getting the beautiful result we want at the end the crumb so we obsess as Baker's over the honeycomb pattern when you cut open a croissant and so lately we have been playing with different lamination patterns different folding ratios that produce different amounts of layers in order to achieve more or less openness more or less layers and we're trying to find the optimal internal crumb because now that we can achieve that honeycomb just about every time we're trying to make it exactly the pattern and exactly the right web form that we want so here we have a book fold followed by tri-folds and here we have four try folds and what we're trying to do is just compare the quality of the internal crumb I'm using a bread knife I like these angled serrated knives for cutting crusty bread and and also really for cutting anything so this is the the honeycomb pattern that we're looking at and I'm kind of looking at the size of all of these these holes right now kind of looking at it from a Baker's perspective and saying what is the type of experience that I want to be giving my customers I want an airy experience as they're eating the croissant but more layers means more texture so we're trying to find the right balance so this is a slightly different folding technique and the crumb should also appear a little differently so the book fold I should really rotate these the book fold seemed to separate the layers further from one another if you can notice that the layers and this one are closer together than the layers in this one it's because there's actually more layers in this one I believe we did one less round of folding in this one and so then my trade-off is the layers are not as separated in the book fold you can see that you can see more of the layers here and so from a baking perspective once again I'm thinking of things of the less separation of the layers the more moisture that's retained in those layers if you have too much clumping of layers then then you have an under proofed GUI terrible result but if you have just enough then it retains that butter a little bit better there's a trade-off here I'm I'm really getting into the weeds with the pastries when we start comparing the quality of a honeycomb the the cool thing though is that over time you can get to these really technical questions and start and I assume that to some out there these are just beginning stages because baking really is this journey that you go on and that you stay on and it can you can take it down any rabbit hole you'd like the croissants for us have been this giant rabbit hole from the beginning they've sort of captivated everybody everybody here so I cut open another couple this one is the 4 x trifold this one is the the book fold instead of the trifold and I have another similar result so in these pastries again there's more layers in this one that are a little denser it it's more uniform and so in some ways it's more aesthetically pleasing but this one has more layer separation the more distance between the layers but some of the layers are actually still kept together I personally prefer this result I think that the pastry will age a little bit nicer it'll dry out less and so it'll be a little bit nicer on day two which I have to think about how do my customers eat the the pastry as we move forward with our pastry program we're thinking about how do we get better and better results how how does our product age better so right now going into summer we're actually playing with an edition of butter into our butter croissants we find that the extra butter helps with the fact that it's hotter out these pastries are dealing with the heat of the Saturday out at market and so we're hoping that the pastries are nicer on Sunday with the addition of butter we did this last summer and it turned out really nicely so we hope this summer yields something similar so I've got some butter that's been pressed out it's been pressed out using our roll divider which has a pressing function so it's not really designed for that but we discovered that we had this giant press in the bakery back when we used to literally take pounds of butter and pound it down into these sheets we're then roll it out and we would do this by the Dozen so we would spend shifts just pounding butter and then we got a roll divider on option and it does a whole lot more butter pressing than it does roll dividing so we don't really make that many rolls but it presses butter really well so we can get it to this level and now we're going to move to some really cherished hard-won equipment here this is a dough sheeter I'm never going to stop being in love with this guy because leading up to this guy I spent a year and a half of my life laminating sourdough croissants by hand in a hundred and twenty degree room trying to achieve perfect honeycomb not really knowing what I was doing it was arduous hard work and we saved up for this dough sheeter which still is hard work but we actually have control over the thickness of the dough as it comes down we have a lot more precise ability to handle it and our croissants come out more consistently it used to require the level of skill that took six or seven months of training just to be a laminate our particular style of croissant and basically I was trapped at the croissant roll because I couldn't get anyone else to do it in a practical way so I loved making sourdough croissants it's really one of my favorite things in the world I'm super proud of the croissants we make but I want to be growing trees as well for the future of the bakery so we bought a sheeter and we invested in this our roll divider it's pressing function which is not what it's designed for doesn't really have very much height clearance so when the butter is impressed it barely fits in there so we have to put it between two parchments because the sill pads are actually too thick for the press so we do this one extra step that's how much we don't like pounding butter after years of pounding butter seemingly all day no joke we had shifts of just prepping butter the butter block in between these two silk silicone mats they're called sill pots you can bake with these there they're a completely nonstick surface so they work really really well so this this machine is now set to its thickest setting I'm gonna pull this through and what I'm looking to do with this cold butter still because this butter was actually came out of the fridge was pressed it warms during that stage temperature really matters so when you try this at home and get different results the culprit is most likely temperature this is four croissants in general you have to have your temperatures nailed the entire time so now the butter is the the width of this silicone mat and now I need to take it the length so I rotated it on the sheeter every pass I'm bringing the wheel of the sheeter down and so there's a narrower gap and that's causing more of this butter to spread again this is not the actual design of this equipment this this equipment is for the next stage but we don't have a butter press for this role and we we make a lot of these so this saves us time by basically improvising with the equipment that we do have you can see that that the sheeter started to eat this the silicon mat a little bit crinkle it up that's why you can't put parchment through a sheeter and you have to use the Silpat it's a little stronger at wool substantially stronger so I'm gonna grab this butter I'm actually kind of greasing the the machine as I do this which is not bad for for all those rollers anyway so I'm gonna perfect this butter sheet now I'm going to cut out the sides that that sort of left that border using the the silicon mat itself as a guide to create these butter sheets so right on base adjust stuffing butter into the corners and I'm going to use the bench knife apply pressure now to bring the butter together as a whole and so now I have a butter sheet consequently this butter sheet also is the perfect temperature range for lamination right now if you can find that rhythm you will also save months of arduous labor trying to perfect the temperatures because if the butter gets too hot when you laminate it melts if the butter is too cold when you laminate it breaks apart and shatters into a bazillion pieces leaving you and your dough in a state of nightmarish hell where you're just depressed for a day because you did all this work you did all this reading or training or tweaking your last recipe and you messed up at the first stage of lamination the croissant will show the shattered dough all the way through to the final pastry your customer again might not notice but you certainly will at all the stages the parchment paper came into life when we put the butter on it to press it the butter was between the parchment for about five minutes before it left the parchment so throwing away a piece of parchment at that level would be somehow sinful so there we go we're gonna create sheets of these so throughout the week we build up our butter blocks that we use moving on to another one I'm gonna take that same Silpat that I just used take my next butters so these are this is five pounds of butter that's just been pressed down you can still see how all the pounds of butter were separated before they were in the press so you can see the strips that correspond to what the butter used to be it's a little heavy-handed there so we're going through creating that whiff I'm happy I'm gonna run the length now Oh got a little ambitious there you can tell by how difficult it went through the cedar so I'm not going to modify the width on the next pass I'm just gonna keep the the height of the rollers consistent one side of my butter has already achieved to the length that I want the other side has not and so I'm rotating just to press the side that hasn't that was kind of a giant mess but simple to address so I took the butter off the machine and you use the Silpat as a guide what I'm really doing all I'm doing is taking all of this butter that's the right it's the right thickness already and I'm laying it in the spots that make the puzzle so if you will this is the puzzle making portion of our work week when we do this one of the best parts about working in the way that we do is just the sheer amount of different things that I get to do through my day it is a ton to manage and all of these things bring stress so you know just yesterday we had an oven service man here repairing something that went wrong in the oven and and in our lives the amount of places that could have problems result in almost daily problems to manage it becomes you know a job to manage all the problems when we first started realizing that life was sort of headed in that direction where all this equipment that we had started to invest in for our bakery you sort of always think about it in originally in one way and that's well this equipments going to let me save time and and it's gonna be more efficient and whatnot but it has to be paid for and then it has to be kept up the equipment can break really quickly and if you don't know how to fix it then you've just lost a lot trying to acquire it and we have not in this operation we have not dealt with a season without equipment failure so if you're wondering whether you should start baking professionally and if you should start your own bakery you should ask yourself are you ready and willing to deal with equipment failure all the time all the time when you're first starting you won't be a Ford much but old used equipment and if you can't afford more ask yourself if you have the stomach for for working on your feet 16 20 hour days baking is not easy every person that we've ever hired in here I try to like scare them away at first and I try to scare them away some more and scare them away some more and if they keep coming back then I know that maybe they'll they'll make it here for a little while it's a it's a hard hard job for sure yesterday we mixed English mother sorry croissant dough we mixed it yesterday the croissant doughy and gave it a bulk ferment so just like our sour dough is fermenting now in the bins the croissant dough fermented similar at the ambient you know 80 degree temperature but we ferment it a little bit differently because the end result for us is a dough sheet so we give it bulk fermentation in heat and then we drop the temperature and we stretch these out into dough sheets then we keep them cool till the next day at that point we can take the dough sheet remove the Koosh I'm gonna take my first bit of butter I got to be really careful now because the temperature in the bakery is now 70 degrees all winter we were baking in a 60 degree environment and 60 degrees is pretty much perfect for your butter that's going into the lamination if you could keep it at 60 degrees all day you'd be really happy it's pliable once it gets up to 70 though it starts to melt in your dough so when the ambient temperature in the space is higher than the butter temperature you want the butter will naturally heat so we can use the refrigerator to cool it if needed but it's best if you can just work in the right tempo so that you don't have to cool it and then we rethought it also what I've noticed about butter over time is that it only has its pliability one time so if you melt it it's never going to come back to the same consistency that it started so that might also save someone some time and experimentation you cannot melt butter and then get it to be in these pliable sheets once it's been melted a it's then more prone to melting so it will just melt through your lamination process so I'm going to take the other half of my croissant block and now I'm going to flip this atop the butter I need to finish my workstation here by adding a little flour up top so this is just flour that I'm gonna work with in the in the dough sheeter I don't need a lot that will be enough flour for the day probably all I'm really doing is preventing the surface from being sticky I'm trying to get this sandwich of dough butter and dough through the sheeter smoothly we're gonna go on to the thickest setting of the sheeter before it goes in I'm going to look at the edges and just be happy with what's going in the devil is sort of in the details because the devil is in the preparation of these sheets and the temperature that the dough is right now versus that the butter is right now if you get those two variables right then croissant making is not as intimidating so now I stretched it to basically the full width of my belt here and I rotated it so that I can now stretch it the other way lengthwise and what's happening is actually the soft butter is spreading through this block of dough along with the dough and so what I'm going to end up with is basically this spread out sandwich of dough and butter which will be my first lair as this goes through I'm going to work it backwards and release some of the tension I'm noticing that I am approaching the point that the dough is breaking so I'm putting a lot of stress on this dough and I got to be careful so it's not ruined this so from here I'm going to trim the side and I have a straight edge so you can see the dough the butter and the dough now I'm going to take this and I'm going to fold it in what we call a book fold so meanwhile I'm going to take the rest of the butter through the rest to do through the sheeter I really have to be careful here I really kind of tore this dough of heart so this is a little bit of a dicey result so I'm going to take this dough and also release all of this tension back [Music] you can see that I just stretched it to kind of its tenth degree probably stretched it a little too aggressively through the sheeter so on the next sheet of dough that I do I'm going to adjust and this is just this sort of also is a demonstration of having done this before and knowing how to react in a moment because this is not if you will the perfect moment of croissant lamination in this very moment in time maybe we'll have a better moment on the next block but I'm again just going through my daily experience as a baker and I can see that my dough is is really falling apart here so I'm going to have to be careful to preserve its integrity this is similar to the result that we had last week when we tried to put five butters into the dough block and we were just having a conversation about whether this was possible before we did this five butters seems to create enough elasticity so as to really go at the dough and stretch it to its max getting a good result with five butters seems to be a point at which the dough wants to fall apart and as a result it might just be that we have to settle for four and a half butter blocks for the croissant dough recipe that we're doing we'll see I've got another five butter batch coming up if I get this right I'm gonna be back too if you will even I'm gonna be back to a decent block that I can work with and pass through successfully because each layer is also building strength that I hope I still have in my dough this is by no means my strongest laminated dough in fact you can see that because I pushed that so far and started to break at the dough itself the the integrity of the butter sheet below the dough started to be disturbed as well so I have this first layer of dough amongst all of them where I do have a little bit of shattered butter it's not through the whole sheet and so I can still bring myself out of this to a really like beautiful laminated dough with a little bit of a challenge we're gonna go back to a thick setting this is going to be a key second pass now when laminating dough you can sometimes this would be a time to put the dough in the fridge before you pass it through again there's different techniques but for me it's really all about managing the dough and the butter I've got some dough that I'm not really thrilled with right now the key here is if you do shot or any butter to pass it through again through your shooter before chilling it I do not want to take this butter that's been broken apart into a lot of pieces and then refrigerate it right now because in that way I would be solidifying all the different pieces of butter and they would never become fluid enough to become one ever again so I'm really trying to pass it through this dough sheeter and spread that one layer of shattered dough out I'm going to actually do this one more time and by that third fold we're gonna be in good shape with this with this dough so I'm gonna flour the top of this now before the third pass the fold itself where I fold it over as I've created more and more layers in the lamination is now going through the roller first and this is so it doesn't pull on on the layers it just seems to work better that way through the sheeter so this is the last round of folding that I'm gonna do for this particular batch of croissant dough before these get rolled out to be performed as croissants and on this round of stretching and folding through the sheeter I am going to end up correcting that shattered butter that happens when I broke the dough on the book fold you can already see it happening if you take a closer look at this dough that is passing through right now so now we've gotten to the to the millimeters that I want and take a look it is smooth again you're not seeing the separation of butter in fact so if I cut this in here you can see all the layers in there and you're not seeing inconsistency here you're not seeing chunks of butter if that butter hadn't been well incorporated you'd start seeing just chunks of butter instead you're seeing lots and lots of layers forming and that is simply because I managed the temperature of the butter as I was spreading it out I could have had a complete disaster with this particular batch this could have been a block of croissant dough that caused us a day's worth of drama so if we roll the history tapes back a couple years and you encounter a situation like that I'm keep in mind that this block of dough is valuable it's going to end up making 70 or so 60 to 70 pastries and a lot of butter a lot of time effort energy we've already put a day into it so to mess up this stage was detrimental it's like a one entire person's week of pay if if we get this wrong and yet we had to pay for the flour we had to pay for the labor that brought it to this state so every mistake just painful and stressful learning how to adapt in those moments is survival - to a baker so now we have a fully laminated piece of dough I'm marking it with three finger indentations that that gives me an internal indicator that I've folded it three times and it is ready to sheet out I do want to get this one cooled off now I'm gonna set it down and I'm gonna put it back into a humid walk-in if my walk-in wasn't humid I would have to cover this dough otherwise I would get a really ugly piece of dried out dough later on so we're gonna grab the next block and repeat the cycle so this time I am going back to what we've always done four and a half blocks of butter and I'm doing that because I saw and confirmed with my own two eyes and experiment that we ran last week with the same result we put five butters through a block of croissant dough and we watched as the croissant dough fell apart in the first pass through the sheeter so now that it's happened to more than just one human I'm starting to suspect the butter is the culprit because what else could it be nothing else in our process has changed we could look at the strength of the dough blocks themselves perhaps were fermenting them a little bit too far but I don't think so because the dough came together beautifully after that initial pass so we also make whole grain sourdough croissants the the flour blend that we're using in these is an is a blend of Arizona heritage grains including white Sonora which has been grown here since the Spanish introduced it to the natives hundreds of years ago in this in this region white Sonoran particular has a really deep root system and grows taller than other wheats that's one of the reasons why it's grown out of favor in modern wheat production farmers prefer shorter varietals of wheat because they're less likely to blow over in the wind they're less likely to get damaged and I think that you can even more densely pack them white Sonora being a heritage blend a grain of flour of wheat whites not being a heritage grain of wheat it is it has that deeper root structure which actually makes it better for the earth I think from the gardening you've seen sort of a theme from me and that's more roots means more nutrients in the soil we sort of have to start to look past last century it was a little over a hundred years ago where we were able to isolate ammonia in a laboratory and by isolating pneumonia we were ammonia we were able to give chemical nitrates plants with all the available nitrogen that's in our atmosphere that otherwise doesn't break down for for plants the thing is when we grow that way everything we do requires that chemical inputs and we're robbing the soil of the national nutrition that's there in the first place and we're never doing anything to replenish it so over time our soil just gets worse and worse and worse and that's the that's the land that we are passing to future generations by using heritage grains were part of a solution where we're not robbing the earth of nutrients in the wheat that we're putting in our bread I don't know if it comes across in video it should probably come across in in just my overall expression I'm not at all at all uneasy about this dough it came through in this beautiful block it didn't compress in the middle and bow it's not shattered at all it's going to get to go through a kind of our regular process so I'm gonna cut the end here which I'm going to reincorporate back but what I like to do is cut it into strips so that I can evenly spread it across the surface of the dough and that way when I am introducing this new layer of dough I'm not doing so completely unevenly so now I'm gonna bring the rest of the dough through the machine and I'm gonna cut the other end in the same way this is just to achieve the shape that I want in the block I'm gonna put this extra dough back in as well you can see here's where the the middle portion of the last block of dough was just shattered there was hundreds of pieces of dough and butter that that sort of work visible here I can barely see the separation of dough and butter there are little dimples where the butter began to break a tiny bit and that is nothing to worry about we have a really smooth block of dough that we're putting through right now this side of the dough block is drier in general it was probably side that was exposed in the fridge and what I'm doing by putting it on top here is now I'm gonna fold the book over it and that that slightly drier side will also rehydrate and become smooth over time I'm cutting the ends here so that I can get a perfect block I'm folding these ends back into the dough as well there's just no reason whatsoever to waste this dough at this stage we have run tests we have looked at the crumb structure we've tried to see whether you gain anything from from cutting away those trimmings and being really anal about those trimmings and it's not worth the loss of yield at the end you can't see a discernible difference you can run that experiment yourself if you want or just take my word for it I spent a couple months on it so now I'm gonna go through the second round of folding and then this one we're gonna take a break from and put it in the fridge since we can run ideal back to that fixed setting went through there I'm watching it through the sheeter the whole time and I'm also watching its width so I'm not really looking so much at the wheel of the sheeter that tells me how the thickness and millimeters but rather I'm looking at the dough and understanding the the width that I need to get the block to so that it takes up the whole felt and this is just because I've run the dough through the sheeter enough times that it's kind of like driving a car really it's not something that I'd that that I have to do on a daily basis anymore because I've put in the time and so every time I come back to lamination it's fun to keep learning though every single time you learn something new so I'm releasing tension as I go this is a pretty important step that we found if you release tension as you go through your lamination layers this is also by hand if I'm rolling dough out by hand I'm creating tension and I need to release that tension as I go otherwise that tension will build up in the dough and when you roll it out onto the table it will actually contract the dough you'll end up getting smaller pastry and less uniform pastry because of that and that doesn't just apply to pastry that's a general general good thing to practice releasing tension when appropriate so I have to in indents here that means that I'm not quite done with lamination it's so that if this dough sheets were to get lost in any way we wouldn't lose track of where it is is again we're dealing with a lot of dough production on a daily basis so this is just one of many so we're gonna take this one and put it in the walk-in now this is kind of an in-between cooling process we're trying to give the the butter a chance to cool back down now that we've stretched the butter out we have made it go warmer in temperature and if you take it through another time it's going to spread through the dough more that was desirable in the last block because we had all that broken butter that we're trying to reincorporate back into the mass we essentially had colder butter because it broke at an earlier stage that we needed to warm up to a point that it that it spread through the dough in this case we had an ideal lamination from the first get-go even spread through the dough layers and so instead what we need to do is give that butter a chance to cool down and solidify a percentage of the way back so that semi solid states that we can spread it out one more time successfully and it doesn't get incorporated into the dough chances are that first block has a little bit more butter inside the dough than in between the layers there will be a side effect to my to my blunder with the five butters but that side effect will be so insignificant that I don't think anyone on earth including myself would really notice unless we cut through every single pastry and started to judge the layers really closely now that there's been some time for that croissant block to rest in the fridge we're gonna pull it back out and give it its third round creating layers of dough butter dough butter in croissant making and that's what it literally is we're creating even sheets of dough butter dough butter the challenge is temperature here's my dough block that has the two indentations that's how I know that I'm working on the right one the other one that I worked on today had three indentations already it's ready to go so I'm flipping this out I'm gonna put a light dusting of flour on top it's already it doesn't feel very sticky so you can probably skip that process I still have that habit from the days of hand laminating where every single time was such a pressure from the pasta roller that I used that I had to put flour on every single pass otherwise the dough just stuck so the sheeter is definitely a luxury so I see it's getting caught at the edge I'm just going to prevent it from doing that we're almost at the right width here we are gonna rotate this block now and now we're going to stretch the length here's my final thickness I will release tension here this is important you can see how the dough came back on the belt and by releasing tension there when I roll the dough out again and put it on the table to shape pastry I'm not gonna run into a problem where the dough starts to contract when I cut it because I've taken all that tension and released it here this is where this this sheet becomes fully laminated and so I want to take take care to line these layers up well so I'm going to trim this edge and this also be the edge that we take a glance at I showed you the last one and that was the one that was sort of damaged in the first round you can just see how nice all those layers are in there 81 layers of dough butter dough butter so giving the giving the pastry dough a little more time to cool down in the fridge in between lamination rounds allowed the butter to cool down enough to where it spread and and left those kind of crisp extremely thin layers on that other block the butter is there it's definitely more combined in the dough as kind of the consequence to me experimenting with five pounds of butter instead of four and a half so the 1/2 pound of butter across 60 pastries spread out changes the characteristics of lamination fully a lot of people think that bakers are worried about sharing their formulas and think that by sharing their formulas bakers are giving all their secrets away the secret is in the willingness to wake up every single morning at 4:30 and get this thing rolling the secret is in the willingness everything to feed Harriet whether I like it or not whether I'm tired or not the secret is in every single day working on getting better and that can't be replicated through knowing a recipe so I'll gladly share a starting point for these that's not a problem but you're going to have to figure out how to tailor them to your environment with the equipment that you have on hand that you have the ability to use my equipment was not always the way it is today and my process was not exactly what it is today when I had different tools so there's the laminated croissants from here we're going to again put these in the cooler to cool down for a little while and later on we're going to get after forming some pastries forming forming a sourdough croissant with these I'm gonna gently lay this croissant dough back back in the humid fridge and that's a wrap on the croissants going back to that laminated croissant dough that has now been cooling in the fridge we're gonna roll it out thin and then we're going to make pastry with it it's a Baker's gathering on the table which is really kind of how how we work every day we each do our independent sort of specialized things in the morning and if the day goes accordingly then we can all sort of converge on the table and knock out the scaling our efficiently since it requires a lot so I'm taking this chilled dough it's still got a nice smooth top I'm actually going to take the top the side of it that's drier and face it up by doing so this will actually end up being the innards of the pastry so I'm going to keep it in this in this orientation onto the table so all we're trying to do right now is roll this out flat to the appropriate thickness so that we can create the pastry layer so I'm going to start really thick bring it through you're going to notice that the top separates a little bit the dry parts and that's okay because again this is going to go on the inside of the final pastry so we're going close to full width again I have to be pretty precise at this stage I'm now taking the final result of this and cutting out pastry so if I'm not spot-on it will affect the shape of my final pastry so I'm rotating there now we're going to stretch it lengthwise and we're going all the way down to the thinnest we've gone so far currently for punish Chocolat we're at seven millimeters I'm releasing a little tension as I go and grabbing this metal rolling pin now I'm going to roll the dough up on the rolling pin bring it over to the table and unroll it on the table I'm going to make sure that there is no tension built up just assess the dough got a nice smooth croissant block now this one was my less perfect one and we're making punished alot with one of these we're making sourdough croissant to the other they have a different final thickness now this dough I can tell has smoothed out as much as I can I can expect so between the third fold and and then in the fridge that butter hardened up enough to where when I spread it into this final block I got a really nice result i I think it's gonna make some great pastry and we have really nothing to worry about despite the imperfect lamination you can see that the one is bigger than the other so we're going to take our bigger of the two or longer the two blocks and that's gonna be our sourdough croissant the short of the two block is gonna be the punish look a lot reason being is we end up rolling up more mass on the sourdough croissant so rolling them thinner actually leads to a similar size if we go any thicker than this they will burst out of the heights clearance in the oven for the pastries between the racks they won't fit into the bags that we have for them we're going to measure out for the plain croissants recently we started using a much wider base on these we're always playing with the parameters to try to get the exact result that we want so I did a 5 inch base now I'm going back through and tracing in between the 5 inches because I'm creating triangles so each two-and-a-half inch width represents another start of a croissant on this side I'm going to trim this end I'll try to leave enough to where we can actually use this dough in the production of rosemary braids so I left enough for that I'm trimming the other end and now we're going to cut out the triangle so the of the croissant so I'm going to take a straight edge and get the edge of one croissant down to the edge of the other croissant there is actually a direction to do this that the pastry dough doesn't fold back on you and for a right-hander it's left to right so you're not seeing any full croissants yet I'm going to go down the row and get all of these cut as I'm cutting I can see whether the dough is contracting on itself if the dough is too warm it will contract on itself if the tension is not released in the dough as you laminate it will contract on itself if you see dough that's contracting on itself you've got a little bit of a problem to deal with so it will make your pastries inconsistent so you'll still get a nice pastry but they'll all sort of end up taking on a different size and shape because of that tension that that was built up in the dough and then the dough started to started to contract when cut so almost ready prepping this block of dough I've got this end here which is going to go with my croissant tips we're gonna create these little ridges in the dough that let us fold the edge over so we're making the pastry so I'm cutting just long strips of dough that's been laminated trying to get a decent consistency and the width of the strip's will braid these and make a nice extra pastry not all of our rosemary braids are made from this these trimmings but that's how they were originally designed and then a lot of people start ordering rosemary braids and we had to make dedicated blocks of pastry dough for the rosemary braids they are really good so I don't blame people for liking them I'm gonna steal a few these for myself because I really like making plain croissants and I'm jealous of all the plain croissants you're making over there you know what else we can do turn off 1 hum ha little choir in here that was the face converter that I turned off that's what allows us to use three-phase electricity in a residential garage it's basically a motor that creates that other electrical phase so that the commercial equipment can run because a lot of that equipment is designed for three-phase which I guess is a more efficient way of transmitting higher volumes of power just so happens that most houses are not naturally wired for three phases of of electrical current so we have to create that one with a separate device and that device makes annoying noises each of these gets two batons you can see that these batons were actually made for us they they have a shape that suits the width of the pastry just right we even had the mould made as a semicircular mold the original iteration was Square and it changed the shape of the pastry made it less round so we had the chocolate maker go back to the drawing board and remake it these are awesome these chocolate bars we are very lucky to have such high quality chocolate going into our pastry and we did a taste test amongst Chef types and everybody wanted the 70% more so I decided to make a switch from 60 to 70% the chocolate in these pastries this has a fruity quality to it it's not overly sweet nor is the pastry itself a lot of people dumped just huge amounts of sugar into their croissant dough and we don't really find it to be all that necessary our croissant dough can easily go sweet or savory with the plain croissants only having it I believe the equivalent of I think 8 grams of sugar in the final pastry these guys are really just in the middle of their journey here they're getting shaped right now and then they're going to end up back in the fridge we have to do this part efficiently if this dough warms on the table it will begin to prove and we really want to try to save the proofing for Friday as as these pastries proof all day for Saturday delivery there's a lot of different techniques on the table you can see that the sourdough croissants have a slightly varied shape and technique to the Punisher qalaat there's so many different variants on on croissant dough we're gonna be doing one this week with mulberries where we use those local mulberries that we got this week in a pastry so we're excited about that I'm pretty happy with this dough it's definitely a more of a summertime croissant dough where it can tell it's just getting a little warmer than it would if it was January they're already very beautiful with all the layers to be honest I think this is my favorite part where you can just look at the side of one of these pastries and see all the beautiful layering that it has you know that it's just going to open up really nicely if we can nail the proofing so I'm gonna let Logan finish up those chocolates and we'll move on to these plain croissants so for these I'm going to start this first roll and then switch hand positions and roll into that iconic croissant shape these are just a lot of fun alright finishing up these chocolates we have a lot more of these blocks of croissants to make today for the weekend so we're now training these up and putting them back in in the walk-in there is a step if you're running out of fridge space and you're trying to get into croissants there's a little hack you can make in your production that will help you get more croissants made so we didn't always have a walk-in and we actually built our own walk-ins this past winter and prior to that what we did with our regions which we had about half the refrigeration space before is we would stack them really close together on the trays like so and fit a lot more on each tray and then the day that we're proofing them we'd take them out of the fridges and retry them like this into their baking configuration it was a lot of extra work to retry thousands of pastries and it took a lot of extra time but that was all the refrigeration space that we had so the only way to produce as many croissants was to do this that's one of the reasons why we got to a point that we've built a walk-in and so if you're wondering when is the right time to put the investment into your space of building a walk-in cooler you you you've got to be doing something inefficient first in my mind that you're paying for in this case it was retrying pastries and I remember this is where emerald started on Friday mornings just just taking pastries that were put together like this and spreading them out on on sheet trays yeah part of the job all day is just checking on things so this room has now climbed up to 78 degrees it is a walk-in so this AC unit can can be turned on to cool and drop the temperature and here actually the refrigeration temperatures in no time we do this with a thing called a cool bot it's a really cool application where basically this device tricks the window AC unit into thinking that it's actually warmer than it really is and so the window AC unit keeps pumping cold air from the outside this is a heavily insulated room so we used to use reach-in fridges before the reach-in fridges we were subject to the hundred and ten degree temperature in the summer here so as we baked sour dough croissants in the summer we had no control of the process whatsoever so literally the sourdough starter rule our lives during those days and that's why we were actually working 20-hour days in July even though our business was at in the pits during the summertime with no one coming out to farmers markets when it's a hundred and twenty degrees out so getting a space like this that we built over time is it's luxurious but it was a lot of a lot of time effort and energy a lot of blood sweat and tears to get this room into existence even the building of it when we had to displace space valuable space in the bakery was really rough so these croissants they started proofing this morning we're gonna be baking them later on the key here is to see the expansion of them in this room so it's warm it's humid these devices around are keeping it warm and humid but what I'm looking for in this pastry is growth I'm looking for layer separation so there's 81 layers of dough butter dough butter dough butter that I'm actually making the next batch of today but for this one I'm just looking to see that that layers the layers will start to expand and as you touch the pastry it'll actually bounce back at you as though it has trapped gas that's still waiting to explode out in the oven if I touch this pastry there's very little bounce back and instead my fingers are kind of sticking to the top that's how I know that we're hours away but these pastries have to be in this perfect environment and this is the most important component of a sourdough croissant you can nail you're lamination you can do everything else right and you will not achieve a good result at all and trust me I spent a year of my life laminating over 40 hours a week perfecting lamination thinking that that was the answer the sourdough croissant its proofing so I just saved you a year so we have fully proofed croissants now we've judged these I'm looking at them and there's nice layer separation if I touch the top of the pastry it bouncing back at me which means it's still got some life these have already been egg washed so I know that they're going to leave nice shiny smooth tops we just dressed the rosemary braid so we put fresh rosemary and sea salt on top and we're now going to wheel these to the pastry of it there's a small batch today later in the week we're going to be baking rounds and rounds and rounds of croissants but this is just a batch for a midday midweek day so we're gonna throw some steam on this one close the vents at the timer not everybody bakes croissants with steam we find that it adds a really nice color effect to the final pastry and doesn't take away from the pastries ability to rise in the oven you got to play with your current set of circumstances like I said a lot of people don't bake croissants with steam because there's plenty of moisture already built up in the pastry itself to release into the oven chamber we elect to use steam though we're gonna take a look at the inside of one of our fully baked Pont au chocolat this is probably the product that we have a lot of probably almost the most pride in locally sourced chocolate it's a bean to bar chocolate DNA chocolate it's a local operation here in Arizona where des neige the owner she grabs cocoa beans and brings them in single origin from a farm and beliefs she pays beyond Fairtrade cost for them so that the farmers growing the cocoa beans actually could do things like a four deep chocolate apparently most of the chocolate supply in the world is farmed in West Africa often by children who can't afford to consume chocolate there's a really cool documentary on Netflix under the rotten series on this topic well we're trying to use chocolate that doesn't meet that criteria is not commoditized in that way and so des neige makes these custom bars that fit our pastries really well this is a sourdough croissant so it doesn't have any yeast at all I'm gonna cut through it really gently so you can see the the structure of the pastry and so here is the the crumb structure of the pastry you can see the chocolate you can see the honeycomb separation of all the layers so all that this this pastry has is flour water sourdough starter butter some sugar and salt I don't believe that I missed anything we have whole-grain flour and a portion of the recipe which brings more of a nuance flavor to the to the final product you can see all the layers separation this just means that we proofed it long enough and far enough and just rights I still got spring at the end but all these layers beautifully separated so I'm really happy with this one I think it's going to be really nice the chocolate itself is a 70% dark chocolate and this will be the first bite of food that I have all day I practice intermittent fasting and it's right at the opening window I kind of view it as like a starting gate of a race now I can eat for the next eight hours so let's go for a bite I like it just as much as I did when I was just a customer of proofs going to the market every week turned out really nice here want a pastry you you

Channel: Proof Bread

Views: 740,647

Keywords: sourdough starter, sourdough bread, sourdough bakery, make bread, microbakery, local bakery, proof bread, proof bakery, sourdough croissant

Id: RfTSB2EyQzw

Length: 63min 47sec (3827 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020