Baking "Friday" - Bread # 6 - Part A

It isn't Friday.  I know that.  And I missed last Friday.  I know that as well.  Shortly after I published the post last Wednesday, I heard from my daughter, S, that she was in a great deal of pain from a surgical hernia. So she went to an urgent care facility and then thanks to our good friend, C, she was able to get worked in with the surgeon, and had the surgery on Thursday to repair it.  Since S is not allowed to lift more than 10 pounds for the next few weeks, (and J-man weighs a bit more than 10 pounds these days!), we've been helping her and K out as have K's parents.  Combine that with other things like work being really rather difficult these days and preparing for another bake sale, and you end up with a Deb that doesn't have much brain leftover for writing on this here blog.

But I'm going to attempt to write something worth reading now.  We finished Father's Day, and our next holiday is the 4th of July, so our bread for the 4th is danishes.

Wait, did Deb just say danishes?  Aren't danishes...uh...danish?  How can she do danishes for the 4th of July?

Well....they will be made with red raspberries and white glaze and blueberries, so that makes them All-American, right?

OR...we could think of it this way...America is the melting pot nation, so Deb is making a bread that combines French croissant pastry dough with a danish shape and American grown fruits.  Add a sparkler on the top, and we have Independence Day, right?

Right?  Or maybe at least Independence Day breakfast?

Ok, so maybe not, but this is what I made...er...am making...er made...er..am making...uh both actually!  I made a small batch for the family since I didn't go into work last Thursday or Friday, but I will make them again this week, since I "owe" my work taste testers a Baking Friday bread from last week.  Right?

So enough of that.  I will share the finished pastries later, but I wanted to spend this post bringing you up to date on stuff going on and showing you the pics of making the croissant dough.

This is totally Helen Fletcher's croissant dough recipe, and it isn't the traditional method of laminating the butter into the dough and rolling multiple times.  This is a genius method that Helen developed over 25 years ago using the food processor.  It WORKS!  Almost like magic and makes some pretty amazing croissants when they are all said and done!  If you don't have a food processor, then I wouldn't bother attempting these.  But if you do and you're game, then by all means find a copy of Helen's The New Pastry Cook book online and give them a test drive!  Helen goes into much greater detail than I will, and all of that detail is way good stuff to know, so I cannot recommend her cookbook highly enough.  It is, after all, the one and only cookbook that ever changed my life.

The recipe ingredients are pretty simple:

1 cup water
1/4 cup buttermilk powder
1-1/2 T sugar
1 package yeast
1 t. salt
2 T. vegetable oil
3 cups bread flour
1 cup frozen butter

You mix everything except the butter together in a food processor and let it knead for about 30 seconds after it forms a ball.  Form the dough into a disc, and wrap the dough in plastic wrap.  Place this in the freezer with the butter and let it get frozen around the edges - about 90 minutes to 2 hours is what works for me.  It will depend upon how cold and empty your freezer is how long it may take.

When it's ready, then cut the dough into 12 wedges and each stick of butter into 16 pieces.  Working in thirds, cut the butter into the dough using the pulse button on the food processor.  You don't want it to come together; you simply want the pieces to break up and become uniform in size.  Like this.

You can still see bits of dough and bits of butter, but they are not a cohesive unified dough yet.  But once you push these bits all together...

...then you can roll them into a rectangle like this.

Next (and a pastry bench knife is really helpful here) you fold the top to the middle and the bottom to the middle.

And then fold the whole thing in half and turn it 90 degrees ready to roll again.

It doesn't look like much here, but lather, rinse, repeat, and you get this.  (And by "lather, rinse, repeat" I mean roll the dough out to the long rectangle again and then fold both ends to the middle and then the whole in half and turn it 90 degrees.)

And then lather, rinse, repeat once more, for a total of 3 rolling times, and you have this smooth dough, ready to rest in the fridge for 30 minutes or a couple of days until you are ready to form your danishes.

Wrapped in a plastic bag, and you are one rich person, let me tell you!  Oh, the possibilities!

Part B on this bread will get posted tomorrow, and then I will post pics of the finished danishes before posting our Cookie # 6 on Friday, at which point I will be all caught up, right?

That is, unless something unexpected occurs again...but such is life!

PS - S's surgery went very well, and she is healing great!  J-man is still a big confused with why Mommy is not picking him up like she used to do, but he is being quite the little trooper - just looking over at whoever is around to be picked up and taken to Mommy for snuggles.  Cause while others can do certain things for the J-man, nobody else snuggles quite as good as Mommy....and that is just about perfectly normal for this age.

Thanks for your patience as I get caught up!

Love,
Deb