Croissant consistency
So last week I jumped for joy at getting some great spring and 'honeycomb' on my croissants and of course imparted as much of the experience as possible (since that's what TFL is all about ... ie sharing experiences). The last thought of that post was 'can it be reproduced?' - so far not entirely. This week seemed on track but in retrospect the lack of same degree of spring I think can be attributed to hydration. I pushed hydration an extra 5% and noticed great extensibility, which btw, is a bit challenging with this kind of dough. This week I pulled back a bit and immediately noticed the dough was a bit tougher, not necessarily resistant but sort of well, dry and lethargic. The other thing I noticed last week was very slow bulk rise which usually with bread I see as a positive characteristic for acheiving open crumb (I'm a firm believer that less gas helps the bubbles expand with less competition from other gas pockets). All steps this time were suggesting that we were not heading in the same direction as last week and the results corroborate this observation. That is, not as exaggerated spring and impressive crumb. That's not to say that this is necessarily a bad batch, it's ok, the crumb is just doesn't have that wow factor (all y'all know what I mean by that...ie, the anticipation of cutting your creation open). So lesson learned, go with the gut, I should have returned the dough and re-hydrated...I friggen knew it after mixing, it didn't have the same stickyness as last week. Well, there it is - failure leads to learning. One good thing they always taste pretty good ;)
Comments
(Gotta include the pistacio pain aux chocolate)
We can have a tendency to be our own worst critics and overly demanding to ever up the ante from a prior bake. But if we look at this as a marathon rather than a sprint, we can look back and see how far we've come in a relatively short time. And just as importantly, as you finish your post with - we can start to get better at ID'ing at early stages when something might not work. That alone is progress!
Mistakes are the best teacher - as long as we can figure them out. alan
If every bake was an improvement on the prior then something's probably wrong or, you're just a baking genius - but yes, imagine never having any negative results, you would not be able make judgement calls on changes and alterations to recipes. So far I'm discovering ideal dough consistencies etc and more than anything else just trying to improve the evaluation points in the process - this case, should have re-hydrated a tad. Btw, sourdough croisssants have given me a really good motivation for getting into the wild yeast world - I'm finding it a bit more enticing than straight bread and really enjoying the lamination part of the process so hopefully after a bit of fun with vienoisse and sourdough will make a re-entrance into the bread side of things ;)