Lamination!

We attempted lamination this week, with promising results! Lamination, for those of you unfamiliar, is the process of layering fat (in this case butter) & dough through a series of folds to produce a flaky, rich pastry. To break it down: Create a simple dough, roll it out into a rectangle, and fold it around a pliable slab of butter. This gives you 2 layers of dough with a layer of butter in the middle. Then roll this out and fold it like a letter, therefore you have 9 alternating layers of dough and butter. Do this a few more times, depending on the exact type of laminated dough and voila! You've got a delicious pastry. Some examples of products made with lamination are croissants, danishes, bear claws, and puff pastry (used to make napoleons, palmiers & certain galettes).

We were lucky to have a cooling trend to help us out this week, as laminated doughs are rather fickle when it comes to temperature. Our first task was the elusive croissant which, while easy to find, is rather difficult to make well. A great croissant is flaky & well caramelized on the outside, and light & moist with an even, open crumb on the inside. We'd heard rumors that our oven was great for baking viennoiserie, and turns out they were true. The recipe still needs some work on flavor, but appearance was all we had hoped for.

Next we attempted some palmiers and galettes. Palmiers are little butterfly shaped cookies made of puff pastry that has been rolled out in sugar. When the palmier bakes, the dough puffs outwards and becomes extraordinarily flaky & the sugar turns to caramel on the outside of the cookie. All around a great concept! Galettes after that, using puff pastry as opposed to pie dough (see previous post), topped with golden nectarines and sprinkled with raw turbinado sugar. Feast with your eyes, my friends, these items will definitely end up on the final menu!

Up Next Week: Further development of croissant with traditional fillings (almond, ham & cheese, chocolate), equipment repair (no more lost eyebrows & traumatized squeals) & tarot card readings (if leaving things up to fate, its best to catch a sneak peek).