Fall is just teasing us to come inside and start baking! Already at the 'cooking emporium' where I work, we are all about Pumpkin. Pumpkin quick bread, muffins, butter, pancakes, ice cream sauce.....well, you get the picture? Fall has fallen! I am ready.
It was high time to get busy with a challenging dough, I prepare Pizza Dough a lot, leaving it in the fridge to ferment for a few days....it always tastes great!
It has been a while since I made Puff Pastry Dough, but what I really wanted to make were Croissants! That particular dough is always tricky. Most of the time I had the dreaded 'butter leakage'. This can be caused by the detrempe and butter temps being different. Butter leaking can be also caused in the proofing. The baking Croissants end up swimming in their own butter. A bit of a mess, and the results are terrible. Sometimes it just happens.....one can only shake their head. But after all that work making the dough, we eat the mistakes.
I had some fresh yeast in the fridge, the date was still good. I had flour and butter! I didn't have 'good' butter, I just had Land of Lakes.... I was in the mood to get going.
I usually take three days to make a Croissant dough. I make the detrempe, then 2 turns, leaving the dough in the fridge overnight. But, I was in a hurry and finished up the turning process in one day. Left the dough overnight in the fridge and next day I shaped the dough. All was well, dough was behaving, I shaped and proofed. The results were great!
Just needed to wait while they were baking to see if there was butter leakage.....
SURPRISE, DELIGHT.....they were cooking up perfectly!
Once I find some more fresh yeast, I have got some Kerry Gold butter to try next. It really feels good to get back in the kitchen, and what feels even better is the fact that I still might have my cooking chops!
