croissants and danishes (breakfast station part 2)

Everyday we also baked off 3-4 dozen croissants and 4 dozen danishes. We were able to do this right at the beginning of the morning because the croissants/danishes were shaped and egg-washed the day before, so all we had to do was stick them in the oven.

This of course meant that after we baked everything off, we would get busy dough-rolling and croissant/danish-prepping for the next day. I'll talk about the dough process a little more in the next post, but basically the dough would be rolled out to be 4mm thick, then cut into triangles (croissant) or squares (danish). Besides the shapes, croissant and danish also differ in that croissant dough has less sugar and butter.



Also, croissant dough had to sit and relax for 5-10 minutes after it was cut - this was because we would stretch the triangle shape before rolling it into a croissant. Without letting it relax the dough would simply split when stretched, and that's because the two proteins in gluten result in dough being alternately extensible (stretchy) and elastic (bouncing back). (As a side note: learning things like this make me really excited to be in culinary school.)



So then croissants would be rolled.



And egg-washed (seals the pastry and gives it a sheen when baked).



Meanwhile, danish dough would be cut and/or folded into different shapes. And egg-washed too.



The next day we would add different fillings (raspberry jam, apricot jam, cheese and cinnamon apple) before baking them off.



After baking we would glaze the danishes with simple syrup (but not the croissants).



Occasionally we would do something special. Like frost the danishes. Frosting was surprisingly easy to make, just milk and powdered sugar.



And one day we made chocolate croissants - rectangle instead of triangle shapes, with the addition of a bar of chocolate inside.



Oh and chocolate-glazed them of course.