All Hot 'n Buttery

 I eat cold cereal for breakfast. I’m not  much of a coffee-and-pastries kind of girl–I like pastries but it’s just so hard to find anything worth the calories in this grab-and-go world. Coffee shop muffins are greasy and tasteless, croissants are dense and dry. They just don’t make ‘em like they used to. Or I might say they just don’t make ‘em like they do in Paris, because Parisians do not mess around with their pastries. Everywhere you go, they’re divine: flaky, buttery, warm, and moist, crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside. Just the way they ought to be. Commercially produced pastries in the U.S. don’t hold a candle.

So you can either spend a lot of money and take a trip to Europe, or you can invest a little time and make some good pastries yourself. It’s really not difficult, just a little labor-intensive. The list of ingredients is short: flour, butter, yeast, milk, a bit of sugar and pinch of salt. It’s really a small miracle that these six ingredients combine to make something so wonderful.

I found myself stuck at home on a workday one day last week while my contractor was installing new carpet. With nothing to do but sit around and wait, I started a batch of croissant dough. I used the recipe from the Tartine Bakery Cookbook (a lovely and detailed book, I must say), which begins with a pre-ferment: a mixture of flour, yeast, and milk that gives the croissants a rich and tangy flavor.  The pre-ferment was transformed into dough with the addition of more flour, milk, sugar, and melted butter, and after several sessions of kneading and folding and letting the dough rest, I had a large batch of croissant dough wrapped and sealed in the freezer, ready to be thawed, rolled, and shaped.

While the rolling and folding and resting may seem like a lot of work, the beauty of it is that you can spread all the action over a couple of days.  By refrigerating the dough, you can retard the yeast activity and be quite leisurely about the whole ordeal.  And by letting the dough rise slowly and rest often, you give it a chance to develop a flavor that’s deep and yeasty.  So there’s no need to be frantic about this process or set aside an entire day to do the whole thing in one marathon baking session.

I’m not going to reprint the entire recipe for making croissants here because explaining all the steps of rolling and folding is like writing a short novel.  I highly recommend the recipe in the Tartine Bakery Cookbook, and there’s another good one in Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.

My croissants turned out beautifully, and my apartment still smells like heaven… all warm and buttery.  I ate one perfectly flaky croissant for breakfast yesterday with a dollop of raspberry jam, and then wrapped the rest in a cloth to give as a New Year’s gift to my neighbors.  Frequent travelers to Paris that they are, they were delighted.