Patisserie 5: Kouign Amann

I decided to make kouign amann because it's such popular classic pastry in recent years, for obvious reasons. I feel like this recipe was a bit of a softball, because it's hard to go wrong with something that's laminated with butter and sugar. But I have some quibbles nonetheless! 

A kouign amann (pronounced like kween a-'mann) is a type of Breton cake, with a yeasted dough that is laminated with butter and sugar and then baked until the sugar caramelizes and the combined steam from the butter and the yeast doing its thing causes the pastry to puff in layers. They're definitely delicious and definitely not good for you. But I had a suspicion I would be able to find enough people to consume the 15 pastries this recipe was going to make. 

I began with my mise-en-place for the detrempe, measuring out water, salt, melted butter, yeast, and flour into separate containers. I used fresh yeast as called for in The Book; I've noticed that this is much more common in Europe, whereas in America we usually buy active dry or instant yeast. The blocks of fresh yeast in my local bulk grocery were definitely wholesale size, as compared to the smaller standard blocks I've seen in Switzerland, so I crumbled it into a bowl until I reached the required weight. The recipe was adamant to not let the salt touch the fresh yeast, and while I believe this is mostly an issue in larger salt quantities that might cause the yeast to die or at least rise a lot more slowly, I was not going to chance it my first time working with fresh yeast in America.

An interesting thing I've found is that fresh yeast doesn't bloom as easily, or perhaps not at all. A common step in using dry yeast is to "prove" that it works by dissolving it with a little bit of sugar in warm water and waiting for it to foam up (10-15 mins max). This has the dual purpose of dissolving the yeast granules so they incorporate more evenly into the dough, and it also proves that your yeast are still alive and able to metabolize and thus provide leavening. Both times I have tried to proof fresh yeast, it's remained stubbornly cloudy and flat when in warm water for fifteen minutes, and yet the rising action once incorporated is impeccable. Thus far, the only standard I have for evaluating whether fresh yeast has gone bad is if it has discolorations that look black, green, brown, or otherwise moldier or drier than the beigey yellow pink of the usual block. Mmmm, a nice tasty yeast block.

All ingredients for the detrempe laid out.

The dough was straightforward, if a little soft and tacky to the point where it needed a little additional kneading to encourage it to pull away from the sides of the bowl, and I patted it into the best oblong square I could before sticking it in the fridge. I'm still not sure of the best way to shape things into squares, and I'm increasingly convinced, after reading about people cutting off edges before cutting croissant dough, that the images in The Book are of rolled out dough with the edges trimmed to be square.

One day I'll figure out how to shape an elastic substance into a hard-edged square

While the dough chilled, I set out making the beurrage (yeah I know, butter square sounds so much more audacious) using a method I had read online, where the butter is diced and then whipped in a stand mixer until it has become amorphous. Last time I made this, I tried smacking three floured sticks of butter flat side by side, which was both difficult to flatten and difficult to make one even contiguous square of butter.

I tried dicing the butter and whipping it in my stand mixer until roughly homogeneous

I think I was a little too impatient with this method; you can see in the image below that there are still visible chunks of butter. Getting the butter off the attachment also took a lot of painstaking work. If this was a better resulting beurrage, I would return to this method in the future. However, I think it was not to be (more on this later).

The whipped butter before shaping

I thought that the smushing into the square would make it more homogeneous, and it was certainly much easier to roll out between sheets of parchment paper than the previous attempt at beurrage had been with a dusting of flour. Once it was a 4"x6" rectangle as called for by The Book, I covered it back up with parchment and set it in the fridge to chill while I prepared the roll out the dough. You can see that the beurrage is quite thick, almost half an inch!

The beurrage looked so good and square!

I attempted to be clever this time and line my entire counter with parchment, delineating the 24" mark with painter's tape on either end (since this dough would need to be rolled out to that length during each turn).

Getting engineery with this workstation

First, the detrempe got rolled out to 12"x6", or roughly twice the size of the beurrage. You can see the sharpie mark I made at the bottom of the parchment to delineate the halfway point.

Detrempe rolled out to 12", as shown by the measuring mark

The beurrage was placed in the center and the two sides of the detrempe folded up around it, and then pressed on the ends.

I wish I got points for mid-bake presentation.

When it came time to roll this out into the 24" length, I was very disappointed to see the way the butter had failed to be properly incorporated in the beurrage. And I'd dirtied my stand mixer bowl and an attachment! These butter splotches did not bode well, and by the time I did my second turn, the detrempe had already worn thin in a few places and pats of butter were threatening to escape. I do also think that the additional hour of chilling for the beurrage may have hardened it too much; next time I will try to just chill it while the dough is being rolled out.

I am not liking the look of those leopard spots of butter, they mean my beurrage has fallen apart instead of flattening into a nice layer sandwiched between layers of detrempe dough

I did a letter fold after my second turn and wrapped it in plastic wrap to refrigerate overnight, since the last time I did laminating, the 2 hour chill time was not enough to cool my dough down sufficiently.

Alas! Off to the fridge with ye, regardless

I didn't get to return to this dough until nearly 36 hours later, and while I'm not certain this affected anything in the process, I would love to revisit this again where I maybe make the first two turns in the morning and finish it up in the evening. 

Here is where a kouign amann begins to diverge from a regular viennoisserie; instead of using flour to lightly dust the dough while doing the final two turns, sugar is used instead, both underneath and on top of the dough.

The absolutely indulgent genius of using sugar as a barrier to sticking

After the first turn, despite the temperature being cool in my kitchen, the water from the dough was beginning to make the sugar sticky and sweaty. By the time I finished the second turn and rolled it out into a 12"x20" rectangle, the dough was coated in a grainy syrupy time. The Book does state to not prepare this step too far ahead of time because the sugar will begin to dissolve, and I also wonder if the additional exposed butter (and American butter having more water than European butter) accelerated this process. 

The dough was about 5mm thick at this point, and I cut it into fifteen squares. Each square was placed on a pile of remaining sugar to be folded, first with all four corners to the center, and then the remaining outer corners to the center, making octagonal-circly pastries.

Rolled-out dough, a pastry in progress after the first corner folds atop a pile of sugar in the bottom left, and completely folded kouign amann on the right

I placed these in the tart rings I had to rise for thirty minutes, but as you can see, either it was not warm enough in my apartment or these were just destined to be small; they didn't even proof to the diameter of the tart rings. As the recipe had not called for it, and I had suspected it was not necessary per my previous bakes, I did not butter the tart rings.

After proofing, they didn't rise very much and most did not even touch the edges of the tart rings. But the pleats did unfold and thicken a bit.

Once they baked, however, they did expand to fill the rings, and then they shrank back a little. Based on the photos in the book, I believe these were not intended to be as tall as many of the kouign amann I've seen in bakeries, but maybe this is also somewhat due to my rise. 

There was a positive pool of butter amidst all the caramelized sugar. I removed the pastries and poured out some of the butter off of the parchment to make my lunch while I cooked the remaining three pastries.

All of the butter that is pooled at the bottom of the sheet is no longer in the pastries, and that means they're healthier, right?

Here are the first sheet of kouign amann resting upside down on a cooling rack. The recipe asks for the baking rack to be moved to the upper third of the oven because the bottoms of these pastries tends to burn, and burned sugar is a pretty foul taste and smell. You can see from the variation in coloring that my oven definitely has hot spots near the back, and I rotated the pan for the last five minutes of baking. But thankfully none of the bottoms got burned.

Beautiful caramelized bottoms of the kouign amann, just shy of burnt

The weather steadily improved in the afternoon, allowing me to take this glamour shot of this sugary buttery pile of kouign amann, with one split open for your perusal. You can see that there are several distinct, fluffy layers inside, despite my beurrage becoming lumpy and separated. These were absolutely delicious the first day, though I found in subsequent days that a quick jaunt in a toaster oven helped crisp up the edges and melt the butter again so they were not as unpleasantly greasy.

I feel like this could be on display in cafe. Not a very good display, but I bet people would pay some amount of money for one of these.

Improvements for next time: 

• Not a huge fan of the diced-whipped beurrage, but I would be willing to give it one more shot. I notice several recipes have the addition of flour, which is technically necessary for a beurrage, and since I did not have to flour the sticks because I did not have to roll them flat, I will add some butter to the mixer next time I'm trying this method. 
• I'm going to try to make these in one day as mentioned, just to see what happens.
• Next time, I'm going to preheat the oven and let them proof in there and see if that yields taller pastries. Although I am concerned for the butter leaking out during the proofing, if I'm good about keeping the temperature below 80 and having a consistent beurrage that doesn't puncture the dough at any point, it should be fine. We will see if this is worth the potentially higher pastries. 
• Hopefully the beurrage improvement will prevent the sugar from becoming as sticky?
  
• I'll rotate the pan halfway through baking next time, as it seems the back of my oven is significantly hotter even with convection fan on. 
• I really don't have many complaints about how this recipe turned out, but I believe much of that is obscured by the fact that these are just little crispy fluffy pucks of butter and sugar and my brain is not wired to be displeased by it in any way. 

Quote of the day: "This is like engineering, but for baking." -my roommate Kai, seeing me with my taped worksurface diligently rolling out my dough to be 24" and even before turning. This is kind of the point of this whole endeavor, I suppose; I am allowing myself to cultivate my talents in an area other than my chosen profession, in much the way I cultivated the talent for said profession for so many years of my life.