I made a braided Danish before during one of the monthly challenges in Daring Bakers, if I remember correctly my family enjoyed it but of course I cannot say that it was a success because I have no idea what is it suppose to taste like.
Now my croissant is another story..I tried making laminated dough once and haven't tried it since. All I remember is the mess I made with the butter oozing out of the dough; every time I would roll it out the butter is their taunting me. In the end it turned out as a lump of dough with butter oozing out during the baking. How was it you might ask? Honestly I don't remember. I must have deleted that scenario from my memory.
This is one of the classes I'm excited about. I want to be able to make my own croissants. Imagine early in the morning, the smell of freshly baked croissant wafting through the house with the smell of freshly brewed coffee. Not that I’m a big coffee drinker though, I’m more of a latte kind of girl.
Imagine my surprised when I saw how messy making croissant dough really is, especially in our tropical weather! As our chef instructor advise us to have our kitchen refrigerated to help lessen the butter spillage. So add that to my dream kitchen bucket list. As I was rolling my dough out I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I am that I’m not going to clean up afterwards! Haha… No wonder these costs a lot at Starbucks!
To add to the butter spillage scenarios, we have to finish turning our dough and shaping them at a certain time since there would be a next class before us! Talk about stress! Though I think if that was the case the school should invest in a blast chiller or something to help hasten the chilling period in between turns. Sadly we don’t have that, on top of that their fridge or freezer is always full of other stuff!! Grrr.. we need space here people!!
My favorite part of this whole endeavor is eating! After seeing the blocks of butter that goes between the layers, you would think that I might be apprehensive in taking a bite out of this. Actually no I wasn't. I at least have to try one after all that laborious rolling. Pain au chocolat is calling my name! Though biting into it was a disappointment since we used local chocolate and chocolate shards to boot , not those proper chocolate batons. In times like this I truly wished I went to a more generous culinary school, where ingredients are not as scarce. I was already halfway through it before I saw any brown speck.
I’m actually not sure if it’s the school’s fault or the instructor. However, I noticed that he is very stingy with ingredients. When I asked how I can make a croissant with ham inside, he cut a sliver of dough and told me pretend that this is the ham and does it like so. OMG! Now that’s why I call stingy! O.O
Would I do this again? I would definitely do it again and use proper ingredients. I mean, if I’m going through with all the trouble of making my own laminated dough, I might as well bring it all out right :)
Next week is Fried Dough time!
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