One of my favorite cookbooks is "The Secret of Baking" by Sherry Yard. My friend showed me this cookbook several years ago, and we aspire to bake amazing things from it.
Everything I have tried has been intensely amazing, though this is no cookbook for slackers. The ganache - great. The almond tea cookies - great. The croissants - great.
The best part of the book is that it is organized by baking 'families.' Basically, these are technical cooking methods that embody certain techniques for combining basically the same ingredients: flour, butter, eggs, yeast, sugar, water, milk. And the occasional fruit.
The croissant dough is in the 'puff pastry' family - thin layers of dough, lots of butter, different amounts of rising & yeastiness.
This was the second time I have ever made croissants.
The first batch was great. I filled an old bread bag with little croissants and put them in the freezer. Then for breakfast I would toast them, and they were really, really good and much much better than what you can get in the store. 1 batch made like 14 of them - which wound up taking a month to eat.
This satisfied my pangs for Paris & Italy, where you can get amazing pastries for breakfast, and even get them warm. There is absolutely no comparison to the generally crappy croissants available in America.
Though the Rustica local, minneapolis croissants are really good. Seriously, they are really, really great.
Good things:
* I filled each croissant with chocolate or marzipan. In some cases, both.
* My entire batch of croissants cost about $8. As I used part of a chocolate bar + part of a tube of marzipan in addition to the butter. The flour & yeast are pretty inexpensive, though I did get organic local flour.
* This time my croissants puffed up way more.
* I used the pizza cutter and eyeballed cutting the triangles. Definitely easier on the second try.
Still in progress:
* The first time I cooked them, I let them get really dark & brushed them with milk. They did not get a buttery delicious sweet crust. I do not feel I should eat that for breakfast, however, I would like to figure out how to do this. We think sugar is probably the secret ingredient.
* This time I cooked them slightly under - partly to see what happens. Also, I brushed them with egg this time and they turned dark where there was egg. The center of the one I tried was a little on the soft side, though I do think it was cooked.
* I am still alarmed with the amount of butter that drains out. It makes sense, since the butter can pour out when you cut into the layers, but it seems like a lot. Perhaps I am rolling them wrong.
* It's hot today, and I think when I roll the crescent shapes, the dough isn't quite stretching enough - and the force I am using breaks the outermost layer, turning the whole croissant slippery.
* I would really like to roll the dough into an actual rectangle, eventually. I did manage to keep the dough pretty uniformly rectangular. But not on rolling it out.
* I noticed chunks of broken butter between the layers. I think this is a sign I had the temperature wrong, but I had also put the dough in the freezer this morning because I wound up not being able to cook them this morning.