WARNING: my croissants are the cooking equivalent of "Weapons of Mass Destruction"

Mutant — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:29:47 -0800

So, is anyone else out there a frustrated wannabe Croissant Chef? Yeh, well, I don't want to hear from you! Unless, of course, you'd like to commiserate.

But if you used to be a frustrated Croissant Chef, or never were frustrated by the creation of croissants can you please help out? With disastrous results I'm using a fairly basic recipe as follows :

1 oz yeast
3 cups unbleached flour
1/2 cup honey (we don't use processed sugar, so I'm subbing for 1/4 cup white sugar)
A teaspoon of salt (reduced from two)
One cup milk (reconstituted from powdered milk, only mention this as sometimes I've made it a little stronger)
One pound unsalted butter
1 egg

More flour used for dusting. Additional egg & milk used for glazing.

I'm trying to master a basic three turn croissant, and chilling the dough overnight. I previously was chilling after each turn anywhere between one and four hours. Pushed this out to overnight since I thought this was the problem but the additional time didn't really help.

Can you help me end up with more than a glump of tasty pastry after I'm done? I do all our cooking at home, and would like to add home made croissants to my repertoire and our diet.

Many thanks for your help!!

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WARNING: my croissants are the cooking equivalent of "Weapons of Mass Destruction"