Croissants are a culinary item that have been around for well…a really long time. Crescent-shaped rolls are a part of several cuisines–one example would be the kifli from Eastern Europe, versus the well-known Western European version, like 17-1: Croissants. 🌙
Wikipedia mentions that frozen pre-formed croissants are pretty readily available these days (and have been since the 1970s), so making this recipe’s truly a labor of love–it takes a good amount of effort, as noted above.
2 hours of prep time is optimistic–there’s a lot of rolling, pressing, forming, and general dough manipulation rounds broken up by fridge/oven intervals.
Ingredients. There’s not a lot in terms of components–it’s more about technique for this recipe. I chose to include the poppy seeds, because why the hell not.
Dry ingredients mixed together.
Dissolving the yeast.
Dropped in the egg.
Started working in the flour after beating the egg in with the other ingredients.
Probably over-floured it a bit–it’s a fine line between too tacky and too dry.
Rolled it out with my dollar store pin. Cheap doesn’t necessarily mean bad–especially if it gets the job done.
I didn’t go all the way over to the halfway point of the dough with my butter–it just seemed like SO much butter.
Lots of folding, rolling, buttering, chilling.
I kept it on this small cutting board while moving it in and out of the fridge.
After doing the butter cycle 3 times, I did the final long roll out for the cutting of the shapes.
I cut these (somewhat unevenly) with a bench scraper, but you can get an actual croissant cutter, which looks super cool and is totally going on my Amazon wishlist.
Rolled them somewhat unevenly (to match the cuts), but I think they’ll still somewhat resemble traditional croissants.
Egg washed.
Poppy-seeded half of them–that way there’s an option for those who aren’t interested in poppy seed.
After baking–they look pretty good (if not small and wonky).
Despite their small size and weird formation, there are some nice flaky layers in there.
Some look nicer than others.
Broke one open for the photo plate so you can see the layers. These really were good–we made sandwiches with them, ate a few for breakfast, and sent the rest off with my dad to his work. If you’re interested in a lot of work (but for a potentially impressive reward), give them a try at least once. This one intimidated me for a while, but I’m glad I took the challenge.
Grade: A
