A kitchen endeavor long on my wish list became a marvelous fait accompli when a few days off work and National Croissant Day converged earlier this week. A variety of suitable croissant recipes has been tucked away in my yuge yeast bread binder, but this moment of adventure and truth required the confidence-boosting stress-mitigating guidance portioned out by the folks at King Arthur Baking.
I started studying it over morning coffee in the pre-dawn dark of Monday, and undertook the bulk of the prep at a leisurely pace that evening. That set me up to be ready to finish up and bake these beauties in time for joyful observance of National Croissant Day on the final Tuesday of January.
If it's true that my intuitional technique has marginally improved with more bread and pastry and dough experience these last few years in particular, the endeavor still was populated with plenty of "clearly-the-first-time-for-this" fumbles and missteps.
Fortunately, no flaws proved quite fatal—that even when steps occur out of order or the dough is handled a bit roughly, a forgiving magic still occurs when yeast and flour and water and a smidge of sugar and the heavier hand of salt, and a couple of enriching eggs and a full pound of Amish butter, all labor in concert to be better in sum than I made them in crudely mashing together their parts. Not so far from entering my seventh decade on this earth and now I can stake a fresh claim: I made croissants.
Might the dear reader here permit me an expression of unbridled and reckless honesty, where I confess that it was stunning how incredible these were? That the fullness of their buttery indulgence, the angelic flakiness of those layers, the crisped crackle of the egg-washed crust, the tender folds that might color the cheeks of a certain Ms. O'Keefe: this was an impassioned ecstasy of pastried perfection and a self-absorbing moment of indulgent triumph for this nattering novice. I promptly ate four from the cooling rack.
With that generous amount of gorgeous laminated dough, I was able to play around a bit and produce variations beyond the standard croissant. More about that to come in subsequent blog entries!
"Baker's Croissants," by Susan Reid of King Arthur Baking. See also her accompanying blog post, "Making Baker's Croissants: Capturing Butter Heaven," published 21 February 2011.
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