I looooove the croissants at La Baguette at the Stanford Mall. Unfortunately, the quality of those croissants have been going downhill and I’m too lazy to drive all the way up there. I saw a Tartine Bakery’s recipe last year and tucked it away for a rainy day. Click here for the recipe and instructions. When I saw several posts for croissants on tastespotting, I was motivated to give the recipe a try. Let me warn you that this recipe makes 4 lbs of dough AND if you don’t have a stand mixer, I don’t recommend you attempting this recipe unless you are ready for a long arm workout. My stand mixer was heaving and making all sorts of noise trying to knead the dough.
This is what almost 3 cups of butter looks like:
block of heart attack
I think I may want to try to use less butter the next time. Some of it melted during cooking and a pool collected at the bottom of each croissant anyways.
Laminating the dough was probably the hardest part of making croissants. You have to keep the dough relatively cold to prevent the butter from melting, so I had to roll it out then stick it back in the fridge for a b it, then repeat the process. My arms were pretty tired at the end of it.
First turn
layers of dough + butter
I cut the laminated dough into 4, 1lb pieces for easy freezing and future usage. I was really excited to bake my first batch, but holy moly there was so much drama! Other people mentioned that there would be a pool of melted butter as the dough was cooking, but I didn’t realize how large of a pool it would be. I used a baking sheet w/o the sides so all the melted butter ran off of my pan and onto the bottom of my oven, causing it to smoke. My fire alarm was going off like crazy. I had to take out my partially cooked croissants and clean out the oven before I could put them back in to finish cooking. This caused my croissants to look like the following:
first batch = fail 
It was dense and weren’t really flaky. Despite the texture defects, the taste was okay. *sigh *
inside + Mr. Y2K's model hands
I decided to make top one with maple syrup and bacon…a heart-stopping treat.
bacon maple croissant
I was so disappointed with the first batch. I made another one a week after. Learning from my first mistake, I created sides using foil (I don’t own any baking sheets with sides). I also made chocolate ones.
all rolled up
2nd batch - success!
The 2nd batch looked much more like croissants with the flaky layers and were so much better than the first. They were still a bit weighty so I may try cooking them a bit longer the next time.
decorated chocolate croissant
chocolate croissant
Would I make these again? Eh, probably not for a very long time. I can’t justify eating that much butter and dough AND it was just a pain in the @$$ to make. I’m planning on making Tartine Bakery’s morning buns with the 3rd batch….I can’t wait! Those are just sweet, sticky, gooey goodness!
