The internet is full of recipes that you probably shouldn’t take seriously. If you come across a video of someone slopping together endless ingredients with no obvious point, you may be being bamboozled. Or doing something pointless, like in this reel, or this one. You know you can skip them.

But sometimes a perfectly serious cook tries something with a straight face that is simply silly.  For example, Genvieve Yam’s recipe for a poached egg in a microwave is in that category. Despite being published under the Serious Eats moniker, it just can’t be serious.

Here is a nutshell description.

1. Pour water in a bowl and heat it to near boiling, say 95˚C (203˚ F). You will have to experiment to see how long this takes, but 4 minutes seems to work for me. Add salt to the water and about teaspoon of white vinegar.
2. Crack an egg into a cup and slip it into the hot water.
3. Microwave for around 1:20 at 80% power. This may produce one poached egg. If you want two, repeat, maybe using the same water.

So, we tried it.

Microwaving one egg

We filled a bowl about ¾ full and checked the temperature at 3 minutes. It was bubbling, but it was only at 87˚ C. So we went on to 4 minutes, and it was at 95˚ C. Now my Sharp microwave is at least 10 years old, but was at least 1000 watts.

To keep eggs from spreading when you poach or fry them, use the freshest eggs you have, As they age, more of the albumen deteriorates to be more watery.

Then we cracked an egg into a cup and slipped the egg into the nearly boiling water. You may note that moving bowls of hot water around is a bit treacherous, but other than getting a potholder soaking wet, we managed it.

Then we microwaved the egg in the water (at 80% power) as Yam suggested. We checked the egg at 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 1:30 and 2:00 minutes. We went to 2 minutes because whites didn’t seem to be cooked. The photos show raw, 30 sec, 60 sec, 90 sec and 2 minutes, and one cut open on toast.

We pull the bowl out and using a slotted spoon, deposited it on a slice of buttered toast. It was overcooked: the yolk was pretty much solid. There was a slight delay outside the microwave because the toast was just ready: maybe 2:15.

We repeated the experiment, (another egg) and stopped at 1:30. This was too short. The egg white was not fully cooked, although the yolk was runny as desired.

We repeated all this to cook one for 1:45, and it came out very nicely. But what a lot of work, and so time sensitive! And most people want two poached eggs! This doesn’t scale very well at all, as Yam noted.

Let’s use a pan instead!

We put about a quart of water (with the same salt and vinegar) in a 2 quart saucepan, and brought a slow boil and reduced the heat to a simmer. Then we slipped two eggs into the water and started our 3 minute timer. Our toast was already prepared and buttered.

At first, a bit of white drifted away from the egg, but we removed it early with a slotted spoon, and then we removed the eggs to the toast after 3 minutes.  These eggs were perfect and are perfect every time!

There just doesn’t seem to be to be much use for Yam’s recipe. It is not clear where the perfect cooking point is, and you can’t make 2 without starting over.  And if you are serving a crowd, just use a bigger pan. We can easily make 4 eggs in our 3 quart saucepan, and as many as 8 in our wide frying pan. In fact, in our larger frying pan, I have made 16 and once for a family holiday gathering, I made 23 in that largest pan for Eggs Benedict.  Just take the eggs out in the order you put them in.

Straining the eggs

Another way to eliminate the little trailers of wispy albumen is to strain the eggs so it runs off into a bowl. Then the eggs should poach with less debris.

This worked for one egg, but the other broke when it collided with the strainer while we were transferring it to the pan. The one above looks pretty good, but again, who would go to all that trouble for several people?

Why use vinegar?

Vinegar is diluted acetic acid, and the acid interacts with the albumen protein in the egg whites, causing them to denature and solidify. This forms a sort of net that keeps the whites from trailing away into wisps. Most writers have suggested 1-2 Tablespoons in a pot of water. A teaspoon may not be enough. They claim that 2 Tb still does not affect the taste. 

We repeated the standard poaching in pan with 2 Tb of vinegar. They came out fine, although a wisp of albumen sat on top of one of the eggs making the presentation not quite as pretty. There was no vinegary taste, however.

The vinegar soak

Chef Adrienne Cheatham from Epicurious suggests an even more radical approach. She says that before poaching the eggs, you should soak each raw egg in a 50-50 water/white vinegar solution for about 10 minutes. This causes the whole egg to form a coating that makes the egg teardrop shape even before poaching. She, too, claims that you can’t taste the vinegar on the finished egg. Soaking raw eggs in vinegar water and fishing them out without breaking the yolk seems a bit risky, however. It also uses up a lot of vinegar!

We tried Cheatham’s approach, first in a standard mixing bowl.  The eggs collided and were difficult to separate. In picking up one egg, the white pulled away from the yolk completely and didn’t produce a good looking poached egg, just a yolk ball. The other egg looked very nice.

We repeated her approach using a wider bowl so the eggs didn’t collide, and a 3 quart pan to keep the eggs apart.  They came out beautifully, but my goodness, what a lot of work! And imagine doing this with even four eggs! It would be really difficult.

While this vinegar-soaked result is lovely, you can get any number of eggs you need just by poaching them in the pan in salted water with or without vinegar.  And if you just want one egg, the microwave method works, but it is pretty fussy and take more time than cooking two in a pan. It is also very time sensitive.

In previous articles, we’ve shown you how to make mini croissants, and how to make full size croissants. In this article, we show you how to up your game, using European style butters.

There is nothing as delicious as a warm buttery croissant and in this article we’ll show you how to make croissants using European butters like Kerrygold. These butters are lower in water content and higher in butterfat, making them rich and smooth. However, they also have a lower melting point than conventional U.S. butters and you need to keep both the butter and the dough cold to make the croissants a success.

Kerrygold butter is created in Ireland, and usually packaged in 250 gram blocks. In the U.S., the Illinois packager forms the butter into similar half pound blocks (227 grams). If you cut a block in half lengthwise, each is a quarter pound and for this half-recipe, we’ll need 2-1/2 quarter pound blocks, or 5 halves of quarter pound sticks.

Ingredients

• ½ cup milk
• 2 tsp active dry yeast
• 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour (plus more for rolling the dough and butter)
• ¼ cup sugar
• 1 ½  Tb coarse salt
• ½ cup water (about)
• 12 oz  cold, unsalted grass-fed butter, such as Kerrygold.
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten for the egg wash
• A ruler or tape measure and a drawing triangle, and wheel cutter if you have one

First day

1. In a microwave, heat the milk in a pitcher or small bowl until it is  about 110˚ F. This will only take 15-20 seconds. Add the yeast to the pitcher and let it proof for 5 minutes.
2. Mix the flour, sugar and salt, the yeast/milk mixture and the water to the bowl of an electric mixer and the paddle attachment. Beat it until the dough just comes together, about 2 minutes. The dough can be a little sticky, as long as when you knead it on a floured board, it becomes smooth.
3. Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface and form it into a smooth ball. To help you roll this inro a rectangle later, cut a cross halfway down the dough ball
4.  Wrap the dough in plastic wrap or a gallon freezer bag, or a covered bowl, and chill for 6 hours or overnight.

Second Day

1. Cut the butter into 5 half-sticks and arrange them on a sheet of baking parchment. Kerrygold comes in half pound blocks, and you will need 1-1/4 of them.
2. Wrap the butter in the parchment, and pound it with a rolling pin, on a pastry marble if you have one.
3. When the butter is workable, but not too soft, wrap it in a new sheet of parchment and make it into a a package about 4” x 8” and force the butter into a flat 4×8 sheet. Refrigerate the butter in the parchment while you prepare the flour.
4. Flour the work surface and roll out the dough to an 8 ½ by 10” rectangle, about ½ inch thick. Trim it to have straight edges and square corners, using a wheel cutter or sharp knife. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and freeze for 20 minutes.

1. Lay the butter on center of the dough and fold the two sides over top of it, Pinch to close the dough package. If the butter is too wide, cut a little off before sealing.
2. Roll the dough to an 8” x 10” rectangle. Square the corners and then fold the left half of the dough towards the center, and then fold the right half to meet in the center. This is called one “turn.” Wrap in plastic or a gallon freezer bag and freeze the dough for 20 minutes and then refrigerate for one hour.
3. Repeat the rolling, folding, freezing and refrigerate in a bag for another hour. This is the second turn.
4. Repeat the rolling and folding, freeze for 15 minutes and then refrigerate in a bag for 6 hours or overnight. This is the third turn.

Third day

1. First, create a proofing chamber. Fill a large frying pan with water and bring it to a boil, Put the pan on the bottom rack of your oven, and close the door. Don’t turn on the oven. The steam it generates is an ideal proofing environment for the croissants to rise in. You don’t have to use a lot of water. You want the steam, but the oven should soon be cool enough that the butter won’t melt.
2. Roll the dough out on a floured board to about 14 ½  by 8 ½ inches. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and  freeze it for 20 minutes. You may have to fold the dough in half to fit it on the sheet.
3. Roll the dough to around 14” x 8”. Square the corners using a drawing triangle if you have one. Cut the edges to be straight and as square as you make them.
4. Cut the dough in half lengthwise, so you have two 14” x 4” rectangles. Save scraps in a bowl to make Monkey Bread, or an additional croissant, later.
5. Cut each rectangle diagonally, lengthwise to make two triangles.  Cut a little wedge off the bottom of each triangle to make the sides even in length (isosceles triangles).

Forming the croissants

1. Roll each triangle from the base up to the point. Place each rolled croissant on baking sheet covered with parchment, with the tip on the bottom. You may have enough scraps to make one or two more. (See if you guess which two are the “extras.”)

1. Put the baking sheet into your proofing oven and let them rise until they have increased in size by about 50%. This will take 2 to 3 hours. Be sure that the proofing oven is no longer warm, just steamy. It should be about 75˚F in there. If warmer, the butter will melt out.  If it is still warm, cover the croissants with loose plastic wrap for half an hour or so, until the temperature falls.
2. When they have risen enough, remove the baking pan and frying pan from the oven and set it to 375˚ F, and set a rack in the center of the oven.
3. Make an egg wash by beating the large egg, perhaps with a tsp of water, and then brush the wash onto each croissant.
4. Bake the croissants for 20 minutes, rotate the pan, and then bake further until they are golden brown. This will take about an additional 10 minutes.
5. Remove the croissants to a wire rack to cool.  Serve warm.

Warming up croissants later

The rich buttery goodness of these croissants only comes out when they are warm. Before serving, heat them on a cookie sheet in a 350˚ F oven for 5 minutes. They will be terrific!

In our previous article,  we showed how to make a dozen 5” croissants, which make great accompaniments to any meal. But supposing you want the larger, more traditional sized croissants. How to make those?

Well, it is exactly the same as making the little ones right up to the time you cut up the dough into triangles.

1. Follow our original recipe, up to the third day step 2. Roll the dough out to 14″ x 8″.
2. Cut the dough inhalf along the 14″ axis to make two 14″ x 4″ rectangles.
3. Cut a diagonal line in each rectangle from the top left to the bottom right corner.

1. Now you have 4 triangles, except that they are right triangles instead of ones with equal long sides (isosceles triangles). Cut a little wedge off the bottom of each triangle to make the side about equal.
2. Then roll them up in the same was as before, to make 4 large croissants.
3. Brush them with beaten egg.
4. Bake at 375˚ F for 20 minutes, then rotate the pan and bake for around 20 more minutes until golden brown.

Wasn’t that easy?

• We found that we could sometimes make an extra croissant by rolling out the dough scraps instead of saving them for monkey bread. This last one may not be quite as pretty, but should taste pretty good.
• Of course, you may want more than 4, and you can get at least 8 by doubling the recipe. We’ll cover that in a future article.

This recipe is adapted from John Baricelli’s recipe in the Sono Baking Company Cookbook. His recipe is for 24 croissants, and that is more than I could ever consume in time, so this recipe is half that big. Making croissants is generally a 3-day affair, but most of it is waiting for the dough to chill again. The third day, when you cut and assemble the croissants is the only one that is time consuming.

It takes some experience to make really good croissants, but after you have made them a couple of times, you will be really pleased with the results. In our first recipe here, we are going to make twelve 5” croissants.

Ingredients

• ½ cup milk
• 2 tsp active dry yeast
• 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour (plus more for rolling the dough and butter)
• ¼ cup sugar
• 1 ½  Tb coarse salt
• ½ cup water (about)
• 12 oz (2 ½ sticks) cold, unsalted butter
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten for the egg wash
• A ruler or tape measure and a drawing triangle, and wheel cutter if you have one

First day

1. In a microwave, heat the milk in a pitcher or small bowl until it is  about 110˚ F. This will only take 15-20 seconds. Add the yeast to the pitcher and let it proof for 5 minutes.
2. Mix the flour, sugar and salt, the yeast/milk mixture and the water to the bowl of an electric mixer and the paddle attachment. Beat it until the dough just comes together, about 2 minutes. The dough can be a little sticky, as long as when you knead it on a floured board, it becomes smooth.
3. Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface and form it into a smooth ball. To help you roll this inro a rectangle later, cut a cross halfway down the dough ball
4.  Wrap the dough in plastic wrap or a gallon freezer bag and chill for 6 hours or  overnight.

Second Day

1. Cut the butter into 5 half-sticks and arrange them on a sheet of baking parchment. Avoid using grass-fed butter like Kerrygold just yet, as it melts more easily.*
2. Wrap the butter in the parchment, and pound it with a rolling pin, on a pastry marble if you have one.
3. When the butter is workable, but not too soft, wrap it in a new sheet of parchment and make it into a a package about 4” x 8” and force the butter into a flat 4×8 sheet. Refrigerate the butter while you prepare the flour.
4. Flour the work surface and roll out the dough to an 8 ½ by 10” rectangle, about ½ inch thick. Trim it to have straight edges and square corners, using a wheel cutter or sharp knife.
5. Lay the butter on center of the dough and fold the two sides over top of it, Pinch to close the dough package. If the butter is too wide, cut a little off before sealing.
6. Roll the dough to an 8” x 10” rectangle. Square the corners and then fold the left half of the dough towards the center, and then fold the right half to meet in the center. This is called one “turn.” Wrap in plastic or a gallon freezer bag and refrigerate for one hour.
7. Repeat the rolling and folding and refrigerate in a bag for another hour. This is the second turn.
8. Repeat the rolling and folding and refrigerate in a bag for 6 hours or overnight. This is the third turn.

Third day

1. Borrowing an idea from Claire Saffitz’s recipe, we first created a proofing chamber. Fill a large frying pan with water and bring it to a boil, Put the pan on the bottom rack of your oven, and close the door. Don’t turn on the oven. The steam it generates is an ideal proofing environment for the croissants to rise in. You don’t have to use a lot of water. You want the steam, but the oven should soon be cool enough that the butter won’t melt.
2. Roll the dough out on a floured board to about 14 ½ “ by 17”. Chill as needed if the dough seems too warm. Chill on a baking sheet for 30 minutes. You will probably have to fold the dough in half to fit it on the sheet.
3. Roll the dough to around 14” x 16”. Square the corners using a drawing triangle if you have one. Cut the edges to be straight and as square as you make them.
4. Cut the dough in half lengthwise, so you have two 14” x 8” rectangles. Brush off any excess flour and lay one rectangle on top of the other. The rectangle may not exactly match, since the dough is quite flexible. Trim and roll them a bit until they match. Save scraps in a bowl to make Monkey Bread, or an additional croissant, later.

Forming the triangles

1. Now we are going to mark the dough so we can cut the triangles. Start at the top left edge, and using a ruler or tape measure, measure over 2” and make a little nick in the dough. Then measure from that 2” mark, every 4 inches over to the right side, making a nick at each point. On the bottom edge, measure over 4” and repeat nicking every 4” to the right side.
2. Using a ruler or straight edge, make a cut through both layers from the top 2” mark to the bottom corner.
3. Then make a cut from that 2” mark over to the first 4” mark on the bottom. That makes first (two) triangles. Put the little leftover scraps in the scrap bowl.
4. To make the rest of the triangles, cut a line from the bottom right of the first triangle up to the second 4” mark at the top. You now have made 4 more triangles.  Repeat across the rest of the dough.
5. Lay out all of the single triangles (from both layers) and cut a 1” slit in the bottom center of each triangle. Pull it apart and fold one piece from the center to the left and the other from center to the right.
6. Roll each triangle from the base up to the point, and pull the ends towards each other to form a crescent. Place each rolled croissant on baking sheet covered with parchment, with the tip on the bottom.
7. Put the baking sheet into your proofing oven and let them rise until they have increased in size by about 50%. This will take 2 to 2 ½ hours. Be sure that the proofing oven is no longer warm, just steamy. It should be about 75˚F in there. If warmer, the butter will melt out.  If it is still warm, cover the croissants with loose plastic wrap for half an hour or so, until the temperature falls.
8. When they have risen enough, remove the baking pan and frying pan from the oven and set it to 375˚ F, and set a rack in the center of the oven.
9. When the croissants have risen, make an egg wash by beating the large egg, perhaps with a tsp of water, and then brush the wash onto each croissant. In Saffitz’s recipe, she adds a 1 Tb of heavy cream to the beaten egg yolk. This would make the croissants a bit darker when they bake.
10. Place the baking sheet in the oven.
11. Bake the croissants for 20 minutes, rotate the pan, and then bake further until they are golden brown.
12. Remove the croissants when baked and move them to a wire rack to cool.  Serve warm.

You can actually do this in 2 days by mixing the dough in the morning and chilling it for 6 hours. Then in the afternoon or evening, you add the butter and fold the dough and chill it 3 times. It is also possible to have croissants in the morning, if you get up 4 hours before you need them.

Since you will probably end up with croissants in the afternoon or evening, you can warm them again in the morning in a 350˚ F oven for about 5 minutes. Don’t use a microwave, as it will melt the butter inside your croissants.

* When you get some experience, you can indeed use grass-fed butter, but you will need to freeze the dough for 20 minutes before letting it rest between turns.

I got interested in really good croissants after having really exceptional ones on a recent cruise on Explora Journeys. They make croissants fresh daily, and given that there were about 750 passengers, they must make many hundreds of them every day. A really good croissant should be light and flakey with many layers of dough, as you can see on this cut photo.

So, I wondered where you can get croissants as good as those without paying for another cruise!

Costco

There is general scuttlebutt on social network sites that you can buy very good croissants at Costco. We found that you can buy a lot of them cheaply there, with a dozen of them for only $5.99, making them about 50 cents apiece.

Unfortunately, they are not flakey at all, and there are no discernable layers. They are just tubular bread. You can, of course, slice them open and make decent sandwiches with them,  but they are really just bread, not real croissants.

Stop and Shop

Stop and Shop also sells packages of “croissants” with a half dozen costing $5.79, but despite their being more expensive than Costco is, they are just fairly tasteless tubular bread!

Trader Joe’s

Some Foodies praise the frozen croissants from Trader Joe’s. They offer 8 frozen 5” mini-croissants for $5.79. You bake them at 350˚F for 28 minutes. As you can see, they inflate a great deal during baking.

However, once they are baked and you try to cut one or bite into one, it deflates right away: it is full of air and is quite unlike an actual croissant. If you look at croissant recipes, you will find that during rising, the dough may increase by 50% in size, but does not generally rise much more during baking. The reason these croissants blow up like this is easily discerned from the ingredients. While ordinary croissants contain only, flour, milk, yeast, salt and sugar, these contain a host of additives: Dough conditioner (wheat gluten, wheat four, rapeseed lecithin, malted wheat flour, deactivated yeast, ascorbic acid, enzymes) whole milk powder, carob bean gum, expeller pressed soybean oil, egg yolks, xanthan gum, cultured butter (milk, natural flavor, bacterial culture). And the flour is enriched with vitamins: niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin and folic acid. So, they really aren’t croissants at all.

Trader Joe’s also offers full-sized chocolate croissants that you have to thaw and let rise before you can bake them. This probably takes a couple of hours. Since I was looking for croissants as a companion to my eggs, these wouldn’t do.

Kermit’s Bake Shop

So much for grocers. Now we look to real bakeries. Kermit’s in Redding (Georgetown), CT is a terrific bakery, offering breads, rolls and croissants, including croissant sandwiches. These were top notch! And even after keeping them in a bag overnight, they were really delicious!

The Sono Baking Company

And we can’t conclude with praising the Sono Baking Company, that makes wonderful croissants in their shops in Norwalk and Darien. Since Kermit’s was so good, we didn’t go down there: Kermit’s is closer for us, but you can’t go wrong there either.

So, skip the grocers and look for a local baker.

Or, you can make them yourself. More on this in the next article!