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Kouign Amann Post Mortem: crackers and other uses for this dough!

SusanMcKennaGrant's picture
SusanMcKennaGrant

Kouign Amann Post Mortem: crackers and other uses for this dough!

As usual, one thing leads to another in the kitchen. I was not entirely comfortable publishing a Kouign Amann recipe because I live a sugar-free life and those delicious pastries contain a fair bit of the white stuff. I even tried laminating the dough with honey to see if it might make a good sugar substitute (it almost always does). But working with soft butter and runny honey made the lamination process very messy. The honey-filled pastry also didn’t turn out as flaky as it should. It had a cakey texture, which I suspect has to do with the hygroscopic quality honey has. So I decided to leave the sugar out of the recipe entirely to find out what a savory version of this pastry looked like. I figured the result should be a reasonable stand-in for puff pastry.

A few days ago, finding myself with a bag of Kenji Lopez-Alt’s excellent Neapolitan pizza dough fermenting in the refrigerator, I gave it a go. Using 100 grams of dough I followed the recipe for Kouign Amann in my last postsans sucre. It worked like a charm, puffing up beautifully in the oven. I rolled out the leftover scraps very thin and sprinkled them with seeds and salt. Those crackers were so deadly I asked my husband to hide them somewhere. (He ate them.)

So if you are like me and don’t like the idea of a sugar-laced pastry,  just leave it out and enjoy some of these savory preparations. The possibilities are actually pretty endless for this pastry. NeopolitansBouchées à la reinePain au chocolatPalmiers? Turnovers? Apple dumplings? CroissantsPourquoi pas

 

- See more at: http://www.susanmckennagrant.com/2017/01/17/kouign-amann-followup-an-easy-puff-pastry-dupe-and-crackers-too/#sthash.4i3z39ip.dpuf

Comments

Dana D's picture
Dana D

have you ever experimented with honey powder? It's dry and finely ground, but tastes exactly like honey. You can buy it on Amazon 

SusanMcKennaGrant's picture
SusanMcKennaGrant

Thanks for the comment Dana, I've never even heard of honey powder but will definately look into it!  

cgmeyer2's picture
cgmeyer2

wonderful suggestion. i didn't know it existed.

claudia

PalwithnoovenP's picture
PalwithnoovenP

I love most of the pastries that you enumerated and your process seems less daunting for the "feuilletee" pastry family but still with great results!

SusanMcKennaGrant's picture
SusanMcKennaGrant

I do find this technique to be a great short cut, especially if you already have some basic dough retarding in your refrigerator...