Sourdough Croissants With Pasta Madre

Hand-laminated sourdough croissants, the first batch after a year’s pause.

This post will be really helpful for beginners, because you may face the very same result at first. Just gain this experience and learn from my mistakes.

I gathered my understanding and struggles to make hand-laminated croissants with new ingredients and conditions.

This pastry has a list of critical elements for its success. They are:

• butter (unsalted, fat more than 82%, high plasticity, )
• flour with high protein (13-14%) and gluten strength 
• temperature (17-22C while lamination and 26-28C while proofing)
• active, healthy sourdough starter or good-quality yeast

You’ll have an unexpected result if one point from the list is absent.

So, when I decided to return to making croissants, I started with flour and butter. 

Ingridients:

1. Flour

I prefer to use Mulino Caputo. I couldn’t find it in Portugal, so I ordered it straight from Italy (ordered from https://vicofoodbox.com/). 

For the pastry, I use Manitoba Oro, protein 14%.

2. Butter

I was looking for the President unsalted butter, which I used at home. I didn’t find it in any supermarket. But I don’t want to order it because of the warm weather. So I was looking for an alternative. I found Kerrygold Irish butter, with 82% of fat, high plasticity and rheology. It’s a perfect match ❤️

3. Sourdough

I decided to check my brand-new pasta madre. 

Story:

And this is the real beginning of the story 😀

After I refreshed the Pasta Madre and it was time to make a dough (4 hours after the refreshment, t 26C), the leaven actually wasn’t ready for such activity. It was unripe. I knew it but decided to try.

This is the picture of an unripe pasta madre.

Here you can see some clear differences between unripe and ripe starters.

I was ready to jump into the adventure of making SD croissants with the unripe starter, because I was going to add fresh yeast. But I forgot to add them 🤦🏻‍♀️

The dough handling and the butter lamination process.

The dough was easy to handle, even though I kneaded it by hand.

I did the butter lamination at a room temperature of 20C.

Note: After each set of lamination, rest the dough in a fridge for at least 15 minutes. It helps to relax the gluten and cool down the butter. So the following set of lamination will perform easier. 

I rolled the croissants and put them in an oven with the light on (to reach the temperature of 26-28C) overnight.

12 hours later, I can hardly see any difference in their size. They were underproofed. This was a moment where I failed my morning coffee with a croissant.
But I still expect to drink my midday coffee with a croissant.

That’s why I let the croissants proof for additional 4 hours and baked them after 16.5 hours of proofing.

The result was eatable even though the croissants had some acidity. We ate them quickly without any hesitations 😉

Conclusions:

To eat your homemade sourdough croissants, you need to take risks.
It’s a win-win.
You’ll gain the experience, or you’ll gain the experience 🏆 and eat croissants 🏆🥐

Recipe:

Thanks, _flour_water_salt for this 100% Sourdough Croissants recipe. It includes a liquid starter (with 100% hydration), but I used a stiff starter for this batch of croissants.

Sourdough Croissants

flo_water_salt

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 3 days d

Cook Time 25 minutes mins

Course Viennoiserie pastry

Servings 8 croissants

Equipment

• 1 mixing bowl
• 1 kitchen scales
• 1 reusable bowl cower
• 1 dough scraper
• 1 roller pin
• plastic wrap (clingfilm) to cover the dough to protect it from drying out in the fridge.
• parchment paper

Ingredients

  

• 100 g levain 100% hydration
• 250 g pastry flour, 13-14 protein
• 20 g unsalted butter 82%
• 30 g brown sugar
• 5 g fine salt
• 90 g whole fat milk
• 30 g water

Butter for lamination

• 130 g unsalted butter

Instructions

 

Day 1

• Prepare a leaven. Mix flour, water and leaven in proportion 1:1:1 and let it rise for 5-6 hours at 24-26℃.
• When the leaven is ready, mix all the ingredients in a bowl.
• Knead the dough 5 mins until a smooth ball is formed.
• Proof the dough covered at temperature 26° C, 1-2h.
• Then, put the dough covered into the fridge overnight.

Day 2

• Fold a parchment paper in half and measure a rectangle, sized 15×20 cm.
• Cut the butter for lamination (130g) into a rectangle 15×20 cm. Roll out the butter to have the same thickness and cool down in the fridge for at least 1 hour.

First Set of Lamination:

• Take the dough out of the fridge and roll it into a rectangle sized 15×30 cm.
• Take the butter out of the fridge and give it 5 mins to warm up a little bit. Place the butter over ⅔ dough and lock the butter in. Roll out the dough and do a double fold (book fold).
• Cool down and relax the dough for 15 mins in the fridge.

Second Set of Lamination:

• Take the dough from the fridge. Roll out to 25x50cm. Do a single fold (letter fold). Rest 1-2hr in the fridge.
• Roll out 25x60cm. Cut into triangles of 10x25cm, roll into croissants.
• The final proof overnight, t 26-28°C. The Croissants should be cloudy and jiggle when you shake the tray.

Day 3

• Egg wash the croissants before baking. For the eggwash I use 1 quail egg and a table spoon of milk.
• Bake at 180°C for 25 mins using the Convection type of cooking.
• Remove your hand-laminated, 100% sourdough croissants from the oven. Let them cool down a little bit while you're making a cup of coffee.
• Enjoy this moment of pleasure!

Keyword Croissants