Wednesday 21 March 2007

le cordon bleu - day 24


I think I have enough croissants to open up a shop (well minus the 2.5 croissants which have gone into my stomach since I've come home from class). I noticed that the TAFE cafeteria was selling croissants for about $3.80 each; that's almost $150 worth of croissants that I brought home today, also equivalent to about 2.5kg of croissants in weight. And well, I reckon I did a pretty good job (taste is SUPER!!!) and I've got an offering of Plain Croissants, Cheese Croissants, Ham & Cheese Croissants, Marzipan Croissants and should you like, I can even do a Frangipane filling to fill up the plain croissants and have them toasted with almonds (hence an almond croissant). The chef was saying how almond croissants are usually the product of day-old plain croissants, in industry they just heat them up with the almond feeling the next day. Regardless of whether or not they're old or not, almond croissants have got to be the yummiest things!

Anyhow, I need to remind myself to be patient and make sure I plasticise my butter to get it the same consistency as the dough for both puff pastry and croissant dough. Whilst my croissants came out fine today, I still had a lot of butter running out onto the tray like with my vol au vents. Fortunately the butter didn't burn the bottom of my croissants like they did with the vol au vents. phew! I really don't want to have to resit my practical next week just because my puff pastry has lumps of butter in it. *shudders*, our chef today made the exam sound so scary!

So I guess that brings us to the end of croissant week and our week of rich doughs. It'll be final exam time next week so no new recipes till the following week!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

what dya mean by plasticise? lol such a mad term!

Anonymous said...

*droolz*

panda said...

suze: Plasticising butter basically means that you need to make your butter pliable and soft such that it has the same consistency as your puff pastry dough. If butter isn't properly plasticised, you'll find it difficult to do your laminations for end up with butter lumps in your dough (this butter ends up running out when it comes to baking). What's really mad is that it's a lot of banging and a lot of noise because you basically whack at the butter with a rolling pin to get it to the right consistency. The not so mad thing is when your butter starts moving on the table and when you get your hand to keep it in place, you hit yourself and it hurts:(

grace: *wipes drool* :P