I’m giving a pastry and baking class to some of my friends, what they were struggling the most – to prepare the croissant dough. They love the croissants, they love the croissants I made and they want to do by themselves. I remember when I still studied at Le Cordon Bleu, the temperature is always set 20oC in the kitchen, but I’m sure it was much colder, probably somewhere between 18oC and 20oC.
The colder the better and if with the croissant machine – it’s simply amazing! But if the kitchen temperature is always around 27-28oC, even with the air-conditioner set at 18oC, and no machine? How can we do that? The refrigerator and our hands are the saver! Do quick and if we feel the dough too soft, time to send back to the fridge for at least 20-30 minutes! But believe me it’s fun and feel rewarded later when tasting your hand-made croissant!
Step 1 Croissant dough
- Bread flour 125 gr.
- All purpose flour 125 gr.
- Salt 5 gr.
- Dry yeast 2-3 gr.
- Sugar 30 gr.
- Butter 25 gr.
- Water 80 ml.
- Milk 50 l.
- Dusting flour 50 gr.
For the turns (tourage)
- Butter 125 gr. (ideally dry butter but I used Anchor or President – unsalted, it’s good!)
Knead all together except the tourage butter, at first speed for 5′ then 10′ at the second speed, until we get very smooth dough. Cover it with film and keep in the fridge overnight.
With baking paper or plastic bag, make 125 gr. of tourage butter into thin, square shape. Keep it in the fridge until next day use.
Next day, put the tourage butter on the croissant dough , cover it as an envelope, then do 5 single turns or 3 double turns or 1 double, 1 single. We need to do it quick between each turn and put it back in the fridge, otherwise the butter will be melted and cause a big trouble. During making the turns, we need to dust the surface and the dough, but remember to clean all dusting flour on the dough when fold it.
After all turns, now time to lengthen and cut out the dough into the squares (15 cm by 15 cm), the thickness should be around 3 mm. or 3,5 mm.
It’s quite difficult for me to describe how to create the Danish as in the photo, I didn’t have time to take photo as we were quite busy to prepare another stuffs. Anyway, I’m trying – fold the square dough (15 cm x 15cm) into a triangle, use the sharp knife to cut two lines from two sides nearly to the top and open it back to square, the two lines that has been cut, we can overlap it, do keep enough space in the center – where we will either put some creme (egg custard) or jam and let it rest for at least two hours at room temperature before bake it at 160oC. Don’t forget the egg wash!
Now another tip, you can use fresh fruit as I did, but you also can use canned fruits and even bake it, but as I prefer to see my Danish with fresh fruits on it, so I just baked it after making small holes, put some pineapple jam on it or a mixture of flour with sugar. Fruits can come later after the baked Danish cooling down!
There is many different kinds of Danish made of croissant dough, but I prefer this one as it comes with fruits! Hope I will share another Danish next time with more photos!
Note: I promise next time if I do Danish again, I will definitely take photos, much better than my explanation!
Le petit renard 