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Thursday, June 23, 2011

Croissants made with poolish - the best so far, taste-wise


Having freshly baked croissants from your own oven for breakfast is something special, very special.  It makes perfect treat for weekend (that’s when I usually make croissants/laminated pastries). Umm… warm croissant with wonderful buttery aroma, what a fantastic way to spend the weekend.  Not only it tastes like heavenly, it smells like one too.Like anything else homemade, you-made croissant will taste better or at least equally nice as store-bought. 



Apart from practicing and trying to perfect the croissant making, I’ve also been trying making different kinds of croissants; croissant made with pre-ferment and whole wheat croissants. Last week was the turn for croissant made with poolish (liquid pre-ferment) from Suas’s Advance Bread and Pastry cookbook. I was first introduced to poolish croissant by a wonderful post by Txfarmer on The Fresh Loaf.

Perfect breakfast with homemade jam

I find the poolish croissant was relatively easy to work with and produced great tasting croissant with nutty hint. The recipe also contains small amount of malt powder which gave a lovely nice colour to the crust. I also included 3% soy flour in the formula (replacing 3% of bread flour with soy flour).


When making croissants, one can’t help having dough scraps from the trimming during the shaping and rolling. I have used the scrap to make pesto baguettes, chocolate croissant and simply  re-roll them into croissants. Amazingly, they all worked extremely well. Dough scraps surprisingly produced flaky croissants. I could hardly tell that they were made from pieces of dough scraps mould together.

Croissants made from dough scraps.
Not too bad comparing to Bourke Street Bakery's

Poolish croissant was so far the most flavoursome I have made. Next up, I will be trying croissant with sourdough starter, which I am hoping that it will taste even better.

Note:
For this recipe and great tips on making croissant, I encouraged you to visit txfarmer’s blog on The Fresh Loaf.

If you will ever attempt making croissants, remember the most important thing is "croissant needs to be proofed until it is wobbly, really soft and layers can be easily seen". 

I also like to preheat the oven at 240C and reduce to 195C just before baking.

Other great tips on making croissants can also be found on Chowhound

Submitting this post to YeastSpotting.

4 comments:

  1. they look gorgeous! i always think that croissants are not easy to make, i 'm just not good at handling these type of pastries yet, the link that you provided is very useful, i will read more on that when i want to make them. btw, it seems that problem with your web feed is okay now, i'm able to see this post from my reading list.

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  2. thanks lena...that's very sweet comment. Croissants is actually not that hard, and it will come to you with practices.

    Yes, I finally figured out about the feed. It only feeds up to 512mb of data. And I was reaching the limit, that was why it stopped feeding any new content since Orange Macarons. Thanks again for letting me know:)

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  3. Hello Sue,

    Wonderful looking croissants and equally great words to read about them. Thankyou. Have you made ones with PFD. If so, I'd be interested how you found the flavour comparison.
    Thanks, glad to find your site.
    Craig

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  4. Hi Craig,

    Glad you like the blog.

    I did try pre fermented dough with croissant. I found working with poolish is easier. I am no way an expert but I feel poolish give the dough the extensibility. I also like its nuttiness flavor. Poolish is also easy to mix.

    Sue

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