Today I attended a 3 hour baking course at Bread Ahead in Borough Market which was basically a Croissant workshop.
To make proper Croissants – or so I learnt today – you are involved in a 2 day process. First day you need to make the dough which needs to rest in the fridge for at least 8 hours IE overnight. Only this lengthy period will give you the acidity in the dough that you need to make a proper croissant . This base dough is a mix of 500g strong plain flour, 12g of fine sea salt, 55g of caster sugar,40g of softened butter,30g of fresh yeast,140g of full fat milk and 140g of water.
Due to the fact that this was only a 3 hour class we were all provided with a base that had been made the night before (using the above ingredients) and we started working from this position.
So we were basically rolling and folding – akin to making flaky pastry – I do not intend to give the full process here , but from the pictures below I hope you get the idea:
Pastry rolled out and butter placed in the centre
3 x Folds performed
Sectioning the pastry into long triangles ready for rolling and then into shape before proving
Baking !!! Hurrah !
Ok this course was £80 for 3 hours, so from one point of view it was the most expensive Croissant I have ever eaten – £6.66 per Croissant – but it was a good fun experience and Manuel also treated us to Pain au Raison and Pain au Chicolate and he was brilliant, funny,amusing and educational all at the same time.
And the fact that he decided my lamination was best in class has nothing to do with the fact that I thought he was a brilliant teacher ! (I also did not let on I was a Leiths student and a should know better, albeit I admitted I had made flaky pastry before which nobody else owned up to 😂😉)
So my 12 Croissants were a hit and now the challenge is to make them at home over a 2 day period to see if I can replicate the taste and the lamination. But first I need to eat 12 Croissants as I am not sure I can handle 24 going forward 👍…..