Slow Food Fast

I’m not really a follow-the-recipe-in-the-cookbook kind of person. But I love looking through cookbooks that have interesting techniques. Learning to cook means, for me, being willing to eat your mistakes or half-good attempts and try again with tweaks. It also means playing with your food until it works for you.

So croissants are one of those things I try out again every once in a while, because the dough is really not as much trouble to put together as it sounds. Most of the time is just letting the dough rest in the fridge.

Mostly I keep trying because I’d really like it to work well eventually, as opposed to half-right. It’s something about the baking that’s always giving me trouble–the outside will be hard and the inside will be steamed and still doughy. Or else the things will puff up  enormously but will be more like a popover with absolutely no layering inside because the butter layers melted away into the dough during the long rise. Or if I roll them and bake them right away straight out of the fridge they won’t rise at all in the oven and they’ll be tough. Or they’ll be gummy. Or flat tasting. Or even a little bitter.

None of this would be so bad if it were just my own fault for noodling around with a classic. But the last few times I’ve tried to follow Dorie Greenspan’s instructions from Baking with Julia more dutifully than usual, and it just hasn’t worked out right at all. Worse, in fact, than some of my offhand attempts a couple of years ago when I changed nearly everything there was to change, starting with cutting the fat in half and ending with an almond-flour attempt that actually didn’t come out so far off. Except, of course, for the gummy insides.

But last week I stumbled across the elusive two-part The French Chef series of DVDs from…not PBS, which is probably still out of stock, but…my local library. The disks (2 and 3 disks, respectively) are a bit scratched up and tend to halt at awkward moments unless you fast-forward or skip or rewind or whatever tricks I could come up with.

But there was a croissant episode from the late 1960s in black-and-white, just as I remembered the show from when I was 4 or 5 years old. So I watched it, wondering how dated it was, whether the old recipe was anything like the one she lent her cachet to in the mid-1990s with all her guest expert bakers, and what the results would be like. At the time of this early show, she’d been home in the States less than 10 years, had just delivered Mastering the Art of French Cooking a few years before, and was still extremely rigorous about everything. Or was she?

For the croissant show, she discusses different flours, the toughening effect they might have on the dough and how to counteract it with a bit of salad oil or by mixing 2 parts pastry flour to 1 part all-purpose. But then she includes a frozen commercial bread and pizza dough as a possible alternative to making your own yeast dough. Not the tenderest choice, she says, but for someone who doesn’t yet feel at ease making their own, it’s an encouragement to try making croissants at all, and it works all right. She’s astoundingly practical in these early shows even though some aspects of her cooking aren’t (exaggeratedly rich sauces for sole, for example). And I remember that back in those days, you couldn’t get real croissants in American bakeries. If you wanted them, you had to make them at home.

Dorie Greenspan’s modern, supposedly streamlined, layering process calls for cutting the butter into cubes and mixing them into the dough before rolling out, doing six “turns” with three rests in the fridge, cutting, stretching and rolling the croissant triangles in an elaborate way with some extra scrap dough in the middle for shaping, rising them for 2 1/2 – 3 hours, gilding with egg wash and baking at 350 F for about 20 minutes.

Julia’s 1960s version is somewhat different–more aggressive, and probably much closer to classic boulangerie technique. It’s also simpler. She makes a very simple milk-based yeast dough in a bowl with her hand and kneads it a couple of minutes, picking it up and slapping hard on the work surface, all while talking flour grades (you could talk Yankees versus Red Sox if you want–she probably could have too, come to think of it).

She takes a stick of butter and bashes it into a softened flat mess with a big solid rolling pin, then scrapes it up and flattens it into a square and rechills it. She lets the dough rise until double on a heating pad, then chills the dough. Then she takes the butter and the dough out of the fridge, wraps the square of butter in the larger piece of dough and then rolls and folds and turns and chills for a full 2 hours each time, but only for a total of 4 turns–2 sets of 2–before rolling and cutting out the croissants.

She doesn’t put an extra lump of dough in the middle when she rolls the croissants. She doesn’t stretch them a lot. And she does let them rise in a relatively cool room, but only for an hour or hour and a half until just Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, breads, cooking, Desserts, Food TV, haute cuisine, history, Revised recipes | Tagged: baking, Baking with Julia, croissants, Dorie Greenspan, Julia Child, The French Chef | 2 Comments »