Croissants and Danish Pastries are the new baguettes. FACT. We made a shed load of them last week as we finally got stuck into laminated doughs.
Laminating doughs with butter is one of the key skills of Viennoiserie, and it can be pretty tricky. Get it right and you end up with beautiful, flaky, buttery pastry. Win. Get it wrong and you can end up with greasy products or a clogged up sheeter. Lose.
As before, the doughs are yeasted and mixed in a very similar way, but the new techniques came into play after the initial proof. One of the most important things with lamination is to keep everything cold. You want your butter and dough to be almost frozen with a ‘plastic’ like consistency. This enables you to sheet the dough thin and ‘lock in’ the butter over a series of folds creating alternating layers of pastry and fat.
