February 15, 2016 - 5:22am
Croissant, butter and gluten
hi,
I've learned that butter weakens or shorten dough gluten, and at the same time, I've heared that croissant has lots of butter in it. Yet I've seen photos of croissants with very beautiful internal structure that can only be possible with a strong gluten. I'm quite confused about the magic here. Why croissants still can have strong gluten despite its high butter content?
thank you!
Liming
Share
and is it possible for me to make bread with strong structure and yet relatively high butter and milk content (instead of overly soft texture)?
thanks
Liming
Brioche is a dough with a very high butter content. Typically 50% of the flour weight is butter - some recipes call for more and some less. No milk in brioche though (well, not in the ones that I make) - the liquid component is entirely eggs for mine.
Whether you'd consider brioche to have a strong structure or not is only something you can answer though - I don't know exactly what sort of structure you're really after, but a good brioche can be sliced, toasted then have even more butter melted into it :-)
-Gordon
Croissants are made by laminating, that is, a cold block of butter is wrapped with a yeasted dough then the whole mass is kept cool and folded repeatedly. The cold butter and dough form multiple layers but will remain separate as long as they are kept cool. If the mass warms up the butter begins to melt and absorb into the flour and the layers are lost. When it is baked the water contained in the butter turns to steam and helps push the layers open, giving the beautiful structure you mention; then the butter melts and soaks into the crumb giving the wonderful buttery taste.
Enrichments like butter and milk, when mixed into the dough, interfere with gluten formation causing the gluten strands to be shorter (hence the terms "shortening" and "shortbread"). Breads made with these ingredients are usually softer than breads made without them, although a lean bread can be made softer by using some of the recipe flour and water to make a roux (called Tang zhong - lots of posts about it on TFL) that is mixed back into the dough.
--Mike