boeboen's blog

January 10, 2014 - 5:40am

boeboen

Yet another croissants blog

Hello to all fellow bakers, greetings from Indonesia. I never wrote a blog before, so this is my first time really.

I'm just a beginner in baking world, and right now i'm trying to make croissants. I've been experimenting for 3 months, and done 22 batch of croissants but i'm still far from reaching good results. So, by writing this blog I want to share my experience and trouble (mostly trouble though) and expecting my fellow friends and teachers here to share their opinion and maybe cast some lights to my not-so-bright croissant journey, so to speak. Anyway, lets just get started. Let me explain and give some picture of the situation i'm faced with.

My condition & environment :

Room temperature : 31-32C on sunny day, and around 27-28C on rainy day (we only have 2 seasons here, sunny and rain)
Mixer : small planetary mixer with just 1 speed. I don't know how to compare the mixing speed with mostly all of you have, but maybe its around speed 2 (I have seen speed 1 in commercial mixer, and my speed is faster than that)
Oven : standard deck oven. want to buy convection oven but still saving up money
Fridge (or chiller) : i have 2 of them. one having temperature around 0C, and the other around 6C. and also one standard freezer
As for the ingredients, since my room temp is very unfriendly towards pastry making, so i use margarine sheet for laminating fat instead of butter sheet

My standard croissant recipe:

500gr flour. For flour, the standard we have here is 12% protein for bread flour, 10% for AP flour, 8% for cake flour, all of it having around 0.64% ash percentage
1% salt, 10% sugar, 5% butter for mixing, 50% milk hydration, 0.8% instant yeast, 1 pcs whole egg
40% laminating margarine sheet

What i've been experimenting with:

Changing the percentage of bread and cake flour in the recipe (mostly 70%-80% BF and the rest is cake flour, and also tried using all BF)
Changing the hydration (from 45% up to 55%)
Changing the salt amount (small percentage)
Changing the mix-in butter amount (small percentage)
Changing the yeast amount (small percentage)
Folding process before and after overnight rest, both has been experimented (I don't do bulk ferment)
Mixing duration
Sequence of ingredients added to the mixing process (salt before yeast, yeast before salt, yeast in milk, butter after all mixed, butter in the beginning of mix, etc)
Number of folding used, 2x double fold, 3x single fold, 1x double 1x single fold, etc
Thickness before cutting 3mm&5mm, Sizes of triangle when cutting, Shaping the croissant (elongated/pull with hand, no elongated with hand, elongated/no elongated with rolling pin, shaping croissant with space in the center,etc)
Glaze it with water, egg wash, syrup
Final Proof time , from 1.5 hrs to 4.5 hrs all have been experimented

I have also see/learn quite a lot from sources in the net (whether its a blog, or article or youtube video). I've read/see the posting by weekendbakery, evillychic, julien saveurs, thomas haas, vincent talleu, bruno albouze, galaxy desserts, and several other article and french speaking youtube source (which i dont understand of course), also blogs and posts from the freshloaf like the work of txfarmer, ananda and other great veteran bakers here. as for books, i have read a little here and there like : baker's apprentice, how baking works, lecordon bleu pattiseries, baking artisan's pastries and bread, bread baking artisan's perspective. but still no results. so i guess i'm a slowww learner.

To cut it short, I have HUNDREDS of question i wanna ask (literally), mostly about crumb texture, which i know there aren't such simple answer for it. But there's several that i want ask the most which are:

Croissant's outer crust. The great croissants i've seen nearly ALWAYS having the same trait, which is flaky, shiny, thin crust. its like they deep fried the croissant rather than baking it. one of the example is croissant from galaxy desserts. (if you look closely at the video in their website about making of the croissants, you can see in 1:35 when he finger-pick the croissant/pain au chocolate, the skin is pretty 'shiny' and looks like pretty 'thin'. maybe thats the reason they have super flaky crust texture after baked) i have no idea whatsoever how they can achieved that. did they dip or soak the croissant in oil before baking or what? (okay thats just crazy i know) Because my croissant is flaky but not that kind of flaky. its crispy but the crust is still 'tough' , not like the one i described which crumbled into millions pieces when touched by hands.
My croissants is heavy, heavy, heavy. The great croissants i know out there, having the same size as mine but extremely light. I know its interconnected with the crumb texture (the more open, evenly distributed crumb and full rising croissant makes it lighter), a.k.a if you master the crumb texture, you'll get the lightness you want automatically. but is it really like that? is there any factors besides it that can affect the weight of croissant?
Is the oven we used determine the fate of our croissants, like in BIG way, like if you don't have convection oven, or if you don't use steam while baking, you WON'T get super crispy/light croissant no matter how perfect you prepare the croissant or how good your skills are?

I will post a couple of my experiment result photos here. Some of it standard, some of it a little better, some of it bad and some a complete disaster. None is good enough (for me) grr..the bad one isn't always the first experiment while the better one isn't always the last experiment. every experiment bears its own results.