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!

A week or two ago, the New York Times published a recipe for Sam Yoo’s Golden Diner Pancakes, fabulous, tall pancakes served with a fruit compote and honey-butter syrup and topping. The recipe was quite a hit, based on how often it appeared on social media. You can stand in line for hours at the Golden Diner near the Manhattan Bridge to sample these pancakes, or you can make them yourself.

There are several unique things about Mr Yoo’s recipe (as scaled down for the Times by Genvieve Ko): the most important one is that you “pre-ferment” the flour, yeast and buttermilk for an hour or so, before mixing up the batter.  The other thing is that in the Golden Diner kitchen, they cook each pancake in a 7-8 inch non-stick pan, so the pancakes are wider and taller  than conventional pancakes.

When we first made them, we used a couple of skillets about the size Ko recommends, and since we were making for a couple of us, we had to make two, and keep them warm while we made two more. This worked pretty well, and they were delicious, but we had a lot of difficulty controlling the heat to keep the pancakes from browning too much.

But we noted that that pre-fermented batter also had developed a lot of gluten stretchiness and the  batter was very cohesive. So, we wondered if you could make them on a griddle and cut out a couple of steps (the pans and the warming). This was a great success, and we report on the slightly revised recipe here.

Pancake batter

Pre-ferment ingredients

• 2 ¼ tsp active dry yeast
• 1 cup of all purpose flour
• 1 ¼ cups buttermilk
• ¼ cup water

Batter ingredients

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 2 Tb sugar
• ¾ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 2 large eggs
• ¼ cup canola oil or other neutral oil

Maple-Honey Butter

• ¼ cup (1/2 stick) Kerrygold butter, softened
• 3 Tb honey
• 2 Tb pure maple syrup
• ¾ tsp fine salt

Maple-Honey Syrup

• ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1/3 cup honey
• 1 ½ Tb maple syrup
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• ½ tsp fine salt

Berry Compote

• 16 oz mixed berries, such as blueberries and strawberries cut up
• ½ cup sugar
• 2 tsp cornstarch
• 1 lemon

1. First thing in the morning, combine 1 cup of flour and the yeast in a modest sized bowl. Put the buttermilk and water in a pitcher and warm it in the microwave until luke-warm. (This takes 4-50 seconds. We suggest trying 15 second steps until the milk mixture seems lukewarm. Don’t let it get over 100˚F (37˚ C) or you could kill the yeast. Mix the warm milk mixture with the flour and yeast until smooth and cover with plastic wrap and let it ferment for at least an hour. You can make the honey-butter, the syrup and the fruit compote while you are waiting.

1. Make the maple-honey butter, by mixing the honey, maple syrup and salt into the softened Kerrygold butter with a wooden spoon. We chose KerryGold over the original unsalted butter because it has a lot more flavor. Let butter mixture sit out until you need it, unless you are doing this long in advance. Then, chill it and warm it back up when serving.

1. To make the maple-honey syrup, combine the butter, honey, syrup, soy sauce and salt in a small saucepan, and heat with whisking until the butter melts completely. Add 1 ½ tsp water and keep whisking until emulsified. Leave the pan on the stove so you can rewarm it before serving.

1. To make the berry compote, mix all the ingredients in a large cast-iron skilled, and stir and mix while heating. Heat until some of the blueberries pop. Keep the berries in the pan and rewarm before serving.
2. Heat a griddle to 375˚F. Mix the remaining 1 cup of flour with the sugar, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. In a large bowl, mix the canola oil and the two eggs. Add the pre-ferment batter and mix. Mix in the flour/sugar mixture until no flour is unmixed. The batter may be lumpy and this is OK.
3. Heat the butter-honey syrup and the fruit compote.

1. Scoop the batter onto the hot griddle using a rounded half-cup measure. You can make them bigger if you want, but these will be about 6-7 inches each. You can make 4 at once, or 6 at once if you have a bigger griddle. Cook on each side for around 2 minutes.
2. To assemble, put one pancake on each of two (or three) plates, and pour the maple-honey syrup over them. Spread fruit compote on top of that, and then place the second pancake on top. Again, add the maple-honey syrup and the fruit compote, and top with a rounded spoon of the hone-butter. Serve at once.

These pancakes are a fabulous special breakfast. They may seem to take some time, but you can make the syrup, butter and fruit compote while the batter is fermenting.

So, while this is Yoo’s (and Ko’s) recipe, we make the following simplifications.

1. We warmed the buttermilk and water in a microwave instead of on the stove.
2. We used Kerrygold butter in the honey-butter and decreased the butter by half: you don’t need that much for 2 or 3 diners.
3. We increased the fruit compote to 16 oz. 14 didn’t seem like quite enough.
4. We cooked the pancakes on a griddle instead of pans.
5. Ko suggested using two spoons to make little oblong pats of butter to go on top, but this didn’t work as well with the Kerrygold, so we skipped it.

If you have batter left for another day, Kat Lieu says it will keep, refrigerated for a week. She also tried making the large pancakes in a big rice cooker with some success, but only one at a time.

And, if you have any of that honey-butter left, it is great on English muffins!