April 16, 2022 - 12:00pm
Need help with my croissant.
First attempt at making croissants. I have no idea what went wrong. Light, flaky, and very delicate on the outside, but dense in the middle. What do you guys think? Does it look underbaked or underproofed? The recipe instructed me to bake them at 200°C for 19 minutes, but they were getting too dark. They did leak out some butter while baking (probably 2tbsp). What do you guys think? Should I try baking them at a lower temp?
Recipe:
500g Bread Flour
50g Sugar
10g Salt
250g Milk
100g Soften butter
10g instant dry yeast
250g Unsalted butter for lamination.
(proof them for 3 hours at 26°c)
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I had trouble at higher temps also. Have adjusted baking temps to 15 minutes @ 190 C, then 10-15 minutes more@ 175 C. They still leak butter no matter what for me, but they seem to reabsorb it???
I also don’t try to proof and shape dough on the same day that I mix. Here are my prep notes.
Shape and bake (next day or later)
Good luck,
Phil
Your croissant is a very good lookin croissant, kattleya! Congratulations with your first try!
When it leaks butter and looks doughy inside, then you need to increase the number of layers (folds) in your laminated dough. It's a common problem: too much fat, not enough layers.
200C is low enough, but if you bake in a convection oven, you can set it lower, no problem.
Bread flour is too strong and makes tight and small croissants, all purpose flour is better, or add 25% of pastry flour to your bread flour and use 500g of that blend
You also have too much butter mixed in your dough. It should be about 50g of softened butter per 500g flour, not 100g.
Geez, mariana, thanks for posting that. That's something I never considered. I save my trimmings from one batch of dough and add it to my next batch. But that will increase the amount of butter in my dough which might explain why I have a doughy batch sometimes - too much fat now and not enough dough layers to take it up. I'll have to reduce the initial amount of butter to compensate for the extra in the trimmings. Thanks for the tip.
Your croissants are looking good. I run a small home bakery business and make croissant dough a couple of times a month. I spent several months working on issues, including butter leakage, before I was happy with the results. A couple of suggestions that may be of help. I also think you may be using too much softened butter in your mix and should consider reducing that by half. Though my experience is that croissants require strong flour to lift all the that butter and achieve the desired honey comb interior crumb.
It would be helpful to know more about your process and dough handling. I bake mine at 400°F for only about 5 minutes before reducing and baking an additional 10-20 minutes. You want that additional burst of high heat for the lift it provides.
Hi Kattleya-they turned out quite well for a first run! One thing that may help is to use a more forgiving recipe. Here’s the one i use (https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/33346/croissants-buttery-heaven). It has less butter in both the dough and the laminate (but plenty of it). The post i link goes through step by step, and is written by a very competent baker. It takes most people 4 or 5 tries to get it right, so be patient with yourself. Plus the imperfect batches are still good enough to eat 😉