Week 23 Croissants

 Time for Yeast goods this week. We made white bread dough, wholemeal bread dough and croissants. With the basic white bread dough, we made some baguettes and some buns in the shapes of knots , hedgehog and 
I totally forgot to take photos during the kneading and shaping process. It was fun to see how the dough proves and become double in size. Then we knocked back the dough and shaped it accordingly and proved it again. Then it went into the hot oven and baked for about 20 minutes. 

The buns were a little over proved as you can see it is rather puffed up that the cuts on the buns were all stretched. We topped one of the hedgehog with poppy seed and another with sesame seed. The rest were just left plain. 

Plain white bread

The next was the wholemeal dough which we used the all in method, where we placed the yeast, flour, salt and water in the bowl and mixed it together. Then we bulk prove the dough until it doubled in size and  knocked it back. Then we divided the dough into 3. One was just baked free form and 2 were baked in the loaf tins. The ones in the loaf tins rose beautifully and had better shape. 

Rustic wholemeal bread

The 2 on the left were ours

The wholemeal bread was quite nice to eat. The texture of the bread was soft and had a nice crust on top. I like the hazelnut that we put in the bread, it gives it a bit more texture. 

Wholemeal Bread

Croissants will be the more challenging one among the 3 that we made. We did the dough the day before and had it resting in the fridge overnight. We didn't want the yeast to activate when making the dough so we kept everything cold. We made 3 single turns and 1 extra double turn. The double turn was not common in croissant recipes. It actually made the croissant a little more like bread texture. It was a little too fluffy and less flaky. I prefer the flaky croissant where there were only 3 single turns. The extra double turn also helps prevent the dough from leaking butter and according to my trainer, people actually prefer the bread like texture more these days. I guess I am more old school so I prefer the classic croissants. 

Croissants

I really enjoyed shaping the croissant, unfortunately I forgot to take any picture of how to roll the croissants. Then we also made Pate Croissant Pain Au Chocolat. We had the our tray further in the oven and the heat was a little hotter on the inside and the Chocolate Pains went a little too dark. We ate it all anyway.

When I tried the white bread at home, I thought.... hmm.... this is quite tasteless and I wondered why. Then I read the recipe again and realised that I forgot to type in "Put in salt" in the recipe! Silly me. Well, I will learn from my silly mistake.