diagnosing croissant - layers but no honeycomb
Hi:
I've been practicing croissants using txfarmer's sourdough walkthrough. As expected, initial results suggested I need more experience rolling out dough, as I've never really done that before. Eventually, I was successful in getting a honeycomb interior. After a few good results, I moved onto something else for a couple months, and now, I'm back to making them, however, after four attempts in the last couple weeks, I'm perplexed what's going on. I get layers, but they are a little thick, look raw, and no inter-webbing. See photo.
Here's what I think:
- dough is absorbing the butter
- too much flour when rolling
- combination of both?
For #1, it could be that I'm too slow in rolling it out, so the butter warms up too much, or maybe I'm rolling it too thin, or ???
Another thing, when rolling out the initial envelope, I get a good sized chunk of flour at the edges that has no butter. I trim this off. That normal?
First two attempts used KABF, and then I ran out, was too lazy to go to store, so tried some central milling 00 flour (~11.7% protein, it's what I had on hand).. this yields an incredibly tender crumb so I might continue using this flour. I make smaller croissants, not the large, 7-layer kind, and baking time is about 23 minutes or so.
Thanks for your time!
they look pretty great to me.
This looks pretty good. If I had to guess I would say you let your dough warm up too much between turns. When that happens, the butter gets absorbed into the dough and you lose your layer. To properly layer croissant dough, you need to keep the dough cold but pliable, which means sending it back to the refrigerator frequently, and usually for an hour each time. Naturally, you need to roll out the dough evenly each time to achieve a uniform crumb and layer structure. KABF is pretty strong. I use something similar to what you used: Central milling ABC+ which is 11.5%. It works really well for croissant.
I just did a pretty detailed tutorial on croissants here if you are interested.
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Your croissant crumb looks excellent, and thank you for the feedback! I think you are spot on, the butter's probably getting too warm and absorbing into the dough. My home temps were in the high 40s and low 50s when I had success earlier this year, but right now they are in the low to mid 60s, which combined with my slow rolling is probably what's causing the issues. See photo of successful crumb from a few months back. I will try to move to fridge more frequently, or maybe build a laminating machine (would love to find a small tabletop one!).
Looking over your recipe, I am surprised you add more diastatic malt, if only 4g, considering the abc+ already has malt in it. Even adding a smidgen of d. malt to mine back when I had the success, resulted in gummy texture - I tried it just to experiment.
Again, this picture here is not current, this was from a few months ago when I had success :)
Beautiful crumb you had there. I think the temperature is definitely your culprit. I add malt to achieve better crust color and to get a little more yeast activity (on account of the sugar inhibiting it). I have never had any issue with adding 4% additional malt to what is already present in the ABC+. If you tried malt and had a really gummy result, is it possible you did a long autolyse which supercharged the amylase activity?
I mis-typed, I meant "adding 0.4% additional malt" not "4%".
Since I'd been using KABF, which as you pointed out has higher gluten, I mix all the ingredients at the start until just comes together. Then, I press it into shape and into the fridge. Because both my sourdough is slow and that I don't have osmotolerant yeast, it stays in the fridge ~24 hours instead of 8-12. I should probably get osmotolerant yeast, but I have no clue how I'd use up a pound of the stuff, even if it is relatively inexpensive.
I'm not sure you will get proper gluten development with just getting things together and then putting them in the fridge. You really need an improved mix to get the kind of development needed so that the layers hold. That may be another issue to look at. You can do an autolyse for 45 minutes without the yeast or salt at first to help or simply knead until you have an improved or even intense mix with a clean and strong gluten window.
As for osmotolerant yeast (gold label), you can use that yeast for 100% of your baking needs. There will be absolutely no difference in performance in your baked products between red and gold label yeast.
The reason bakers buy it for specific cases is because it is a little more expensive than red-label yeast. That's irrelevant for home use. So go ahead and buy a block and use it like normal in your other recipes. The other option is to force your yeast to become osmotolerant and you can train your sourdough to do that, but it takes some time and that's another topic :)
How do you make your butter block? I'm bashing the butter with the rolling pin between parchment paper until it softens, then pressing into place, rolling it out, shaping with plastic knife and hands, etc, takes me about 15 minutes and a real pain. Doesn't really look like there's an easier way.
Did you take a look at that tutorial I linked to? Pretty detailed instructions there on making the butter block.
You use zip lock bag, I use parchment paper.
The ziploc bag gives you the perfect size and shape without having butter squirting out the sides when you roll it. You can pre-make the butter blocks this way and keep them in the fridge perfectly sealed until ready to use. I've found this to be the best way unless you have a sheeter.
Your method is great for the amount of dough you do and your turn technique (which appears to be the english 1/3 variety). I follow the fronch envelope method with squares, as it works better for my counter space. Quart zip locks come close to what I need: they are 7x7.5", while the recipe I follow uses 7.5" square, so I may just stick to 7" square and go with ever so slightly smaller/thicker dough. At some point, I'll try the english 1/3 folding method, but I'll need to do all the scaling of the recipe first to make sure it can all fit. This 1/3 seems to be a little better as far as excess dough in the first turn.
After more research, shouldn't be too difficult to make a mold, and I can beat the butter with a hand mixer for a bit to soften then easily spread into the mold.