butter affair

the past few days were characterised by a lot of butter. there was croissant and then there was brioche.

i attempted beranbaum's croissant recipe; still didn't succeed completely, but it was a lot better than the previous america's test kitchen attempts.
beranbaum's recipe was scaled quite nicely so that it was a lot more manageable to roll the dough. she doesn't do double turns. instead, she instructs you to roll smaller and then do just one turn each time. during my second turn, though, the dough began to tear and release the butter. by the fourth turn, the edges were getting gummy.
it really takes practice to get used to making laminated doughs. now i know that during the rolling process, i should chill the dough as and when it gets warm. during the final rolling to get the largest size, i kept chilling it intermittently, and it was so much easier.
i made some plain crescents, some chocolate crescents, and chocolate oblongs. they looked ugly though, because the outer layer was beginning to crust and crack.
there was significantly less butter leaching out during the baking this time, compared to previous attempts. i think it means the lamination was a lot butter.
they looked so amazing! look at the lines on the side of the pain au chocolat; there are so many it looked like a successful lamination. the croissants turned out super crispy on the outside, though the insides might also have been baked close to the point of crispness. there wasn't enough soft bread in the interior. but the insides looked correct this time, with no visible striations. so very delicious!

then there was brioche. i used a dorie greenspan recipe.
the recipe used plain flour instead of bread flour, and so the dough was really, really soft. and then i discovered that the butter was 72% of the flour, which was really, really high. by the time the mixer was done, there was so much butter leaching out of the dough, like that time i made nigella's brioche.
this was the debut of the silicon mold! i made a grand tête. was a bit disappointed with the nub that seemed to deflate after baking. i think this might be the same as panettone; the high butter content will make the bread collapse on itself after baking, so it might be prudent to hang the loaf upside down when it emerges from the oven. the bread was really tasty eventually, probably because of the 72% butter. it was super soft too, but made my fingers greasy after touching it.

made some brioche snails with xt too. the original recipe was for brioche dough rolled up with vanilla pastry cream and rum-soaked raisins, but we changed it completely.
we used chocolate pastry cream instead. and for texture, finely chopped pistachios! i really love dorie's pastry cream recipe. it's a lot less fuss than CIA's recipe.
the next steps were to roll out the dough, spread with pastry cream, and scatter with pistachios. xt did all of that, so that i could take photos! i love the silkiness of the cream, and the jade green of the pistachios just looked so pretty on the chocolate cream.
this photo is so, so nice! you can see the brioche dough is leaching butter out. and the chocolate cream is so very shiny!
slicing it up was very messy work though. even harder was transferring it to the baking sheet while trying to keep it looking clean. in the end, some of the rolls had chocolate cream spilling all over. but where the roll was clean, the chocolate spiral was so pretty.
the rolls puffed and puffed. and then we topped them with more pistachios, which really completed the look. they look like donut factory donuts!
and so delicious too. the bread was soft and the cream was baked firm. omg so much butter to eat.