Patisserie 6: Apple Almond Danishes

 As I mentioned at the end of my post revisiting tartlets, I feel comfortable moving on from this section, but I was concerned about many of the classic cakes having dependency on berries or other soft summer fruit that was not currently in season. I am currently rolling in an abundance of apples, and I still had those cranberries from the fruit tart I made at the beginning of this month, so I have decided to wrap up this first month of patisserie with a spot of viennoiserie in the form of apple danishes with almond cream. This recipe is technically from the brioche and breakfast pastries section, but as I am pretty experienced with brioche at this point from previous projects and have done two lamination recipes this month, I felt it would be reasonable to try this recipe which combines aspects of both. 

I measured out the dry ingredients into a large bowl for eventual kneading, with the salt and yeast on opposite sides of the bowl. Into this, I added water and a "jumbo egg" that I made by beating two eggs together and then pouring in beaten egg until I got to 70 grams. Why would this recipe call for a jumbo egg? Large eggs are the standard size in baking, and The Book mentions this in the appendix as well. At least give us how many grams of egg so we can create a reconstituted jumbo size like this, instead of having to ask the internet about egg size classification at 10pm on a Saturday night.

On the right we have the land of yeast, and on the right we have the salt flats

After taking a deep breath and accepting my hand's fate to become gloved in sticky dough, I dove in and began kneading. The dough came together easily, and I kneaded until it all pulled away from the sides of the bowl.

This is the dough from the above ingredients, kneaded smooth before the addition of butter.

At this point, I'd forgotten to soften the butter, so I cut it into a very small dice and started trying to knead it in. This took quite some time; I definitely got my arm workout in today. The dough was incredibly sticky for a very long time, and I was convinced I was just going to smear buttery dough all over the sides of the bowl for the next hour, but after a solid ten minutes of kneading, it came together into a tacky but firm and elastic ball of dough. I'm never going to take a danish for granted again. The detrempe was not very smooth, but it was as smooth as it was going to get (and looked very similar in texture to the image in The Book). A chill was required to the tune of an hour, but I let it go overnight because in my past experiences, my fridge has been unable to chill things fast enough in that time.

I would hesitate to call this "smooth", but it matches the pictured smooth and elastic step. A product of a lot of hard kneading work.

The next morning, I prepared the beurrage using the suggested method of flouring the sticks, laying them between layers of wax paper, and beating them with a rolling pin. However, I differed slightly from my last preparation by laying the flattened butter sticks atop one another for the final flattening, rather than attempting to butt splice them. I believe this helped me achieve a more uniform beurrage without a seam in the center, although the edges leave something to be desired. But the recipe did not call for a particular shape! I was saved from trying to make rectangles happen in malleable materials once more. You can see that the plastic wrapped dough rose quite a bit in the fridge overnight!

Looks like the yeast in the detrempe got enthusiastic in the fridge

I shaped my beurrage into a slightly more symmetric shape, and then rolled out the dough to be roughly twice the size with an inch of border all around. The dough was relaxed and easy to roll out.

It was nice not agonizing about squaring all the edges

I used my fingers to press the butter down around the edges, smearing it onto the dough as instructed. I'm not sure how this is different from sealing the butter well into the dough, except that it leaves less of a dough border! That might be important because a danish, unlike puff pastry, gets only two complete turns (albeit once with a double fold), instead of the six letter folds in puff pastry, so the butter has less of an opportunity to make it into the seams.

I'm imagining a small version of myself scaling this butter mesa

I folded the top half of the detrempe over the beurrage and sealed the edges of the dough shut, and then I began making a turn by rolling the dough out until it was roughly a quarter of an inch/6mm thick. Then, in a departure from the lamination methods I've seen thus far in The Book, I folded both ends towards the center, and then folded over at the center seam, creating a scroll-like fold of four sections, or 9 layers in total.

This is the first time we are doing a "book fold" for the turn, and it yields 9 total layers in the first turn

I then rolled this out in a second turn and folded it into thirds, such that we had 25 layers in total (two short of the technical 27, but who's counting? I for sure am not going to start trying to do math based on layer requirements). It was now time to set the dough in the fridge to chill for an hour while I prepared other parts of the recipe and called my parents.

And the second turn is the familiar letter fold

The almond cream filling for the danishes consists of ground almonds mixed with confectioner's sugar and two egg yolks, as well as two tablespoons of milk. I don't think I've ever seen a reason for our 2tbsp measuring spoon until now.

Finally a use for the 2tbsp measure (which is also 1/8 of a cup, I guess)

All of the ingredients are mixed until a firm paste forms, and it is then set aside. You can see the onion and pasta sauce for my lunch that I was simultaneously preparing for the background. I've decided that three frozen bags of egg whites is enough for now, and I will simply be eating any separated egg whites until I've exhausted that stash.

It was very difficult to not sneak tastes of this almond paste

Although the recipe asks for the danish dough to be cut in two portions to be easier to work with, I saw that the final yield for the recipe was 1.5 dozen danishes. First of all: Who needs 18 danishes? That's so many! And second of all: How was I supposed to roll out a rectangle and cut it into 9 pieces? I cut the dough into thirds instead, intending to roll out each into a rectangle from which I could cut out 6 pieces to match expected yield. 

I was pleased to see the layers of butter and dough in the cross sections of the cuts. I placed two of the sections in plastic wrap and stuck them in the fridge while I worked on rolling out one.

My beurrage finally seems to be doing the thing it's supposed to do! Peep those thin layers of butter pressed between layers of dough.

It was then that I noticed that my pastry cutter had a handy ruler up to 6" built in. This made it easy to roll out the dough until it was 6"x9", to yield two rows of three 3" squares. When I felt the dough begin to resist before I got to the final size, I swapped it out for a different portion, having learned from my puff pastry experiments that being anything but gentle when rolling out laminated pastry can destroy all your hard earned butter layers.

A little bit of cracking in the beurrage, but nothing like the spotting from my previous attempts. Dough cutter for scale.

Finally, I had all three pieces rolled out to the correct size. I think I've gotten a lot better at rolling things so they end up more square! I cut them into three inch squares and stacked them in preparation for folding. 

Each pastry was supposed to get about a teaspoon of filling, but I found I used about a tablespoon for each, and exactly used up all the filling. The corners were folded in diagonally and pressed down into each other, which caused the filling to smush out a little through the open corners, but nothing disastrous happened since the filling was fairly viscous.

Danishes in various stages of filling and folding. These squares are each 3" in side length, so the almond paste blobs are slightly more than the teaspoon indicated in the recipe, but this was necessary to use up all the paste (and I think they came out with a great ratio of filling as a result).

I distributed the folded pastries onto quarter sheet pans and covered them with plastic wrap, because I was not intending to bake them quite today. The book states that the recipe can be paused and frozen at this point, and the pastries can be thawed overnight in the fridge. As I was planning to bake them on Monday afternoon, I simply placed the trays into my fridge.

Filled and folded danishes ready for a rest in the fridge

The next afternoon, I took some of my abundance of apples (2 small and 2 large) and peeled them. The small ones I cut into quarters, the large ones into eights. I also picked through the last of my cranberries, and measured out sugar and butter. 

The recipe is technically called "Apple Raspberry Danishes," but as far as I can tell, the berries were only used to slightly flavor and color the apples. So I figured my cranberries would also do the trick, and add a bit of nice tartness to my Fuji apples, which are fairly sweet and unsuited for baking. The other component of the coloring for the apples was the sugar, which was heated until medium amber caramel and then mixed with the butter to keep from burning.

Apples in a large dice, butter, sugar, and cranberries

To the caramel in the saucepan, I added the cranberries, apples, and some water, stirring and smushing the cranberries until they popped, and then occasionally stirring the apples to coat them in the cranberry caramel sauce. After about fifteen minutes, they were tender and light pink.

Apples and cranberries added to the sugar caramel, ready to cook until tender

I moved the saucepan of glazed apples to a trivet to cool, and brought the danishes over to the counter for glazing. They had proofed until they were a little puffy, though they had not quite doubled in size, but there's only so much I can do with a warehouse that's roughly 2 degrees above outdoor temp at all times. You can see that the center pinching of the folds started to unfurl as they proofed, and while I tried to pull some of them back together, I ultimately decided to rely on the weight of the apple pressed into the top with some success.

Proofed danishes brushed with an egg wash comprising one egg beaten with an extra egg yolk

After brushing each pastry all over with egg wash, I pressed a glazed apple on top of each and baked in two batches at 350 with convection fan on, rotating the pans once during baking.

An apple piece pressed face down into the center of each danish

While the first batch was baking, I prepared a small amount of simple syrup (1:1 sugar to water by weight, 50g each) and when the danishes were pulled out of the oven, I brushed the syrup onto each pastry while they were still warm. Here is the first batch (the half sheet pan) cooling on a rack after their sugar syrup glazing.

First batch of danishes out of the oven, still shiny with their simple syrup glaze

I feel like my pastries continue to brown even after they leave the oven. This doesn't make any sense, since browning isn't readily achievable with the temperatures from residual heat, but looking at the below glamor shot of the danishes, they sure look more evenly browned than the ones in the cooling rack above. I'm sure the fact that my oven door is almost entirely too obscured to see the pastries from outside doesn't make it easier to evaluate degree of browning. 

Also, I know that this is what all-natural coloring looks like, and maybe raspberries are a little redder (though the pictures in The Book look basically the same as these), but the apple pieces sure look like little chunks of meat. Yikes. This is why we invented artificial food coloring.

And the glamour shot! With one of yesterday's kouign amann on the right

Despite the meaty-looking apples, these are probably the most presentable pastries I've made thus far. I'm really pleased with how the layers came out, and I think this is my best attempt at lamination. Not bad for a month of work! With the abundance of danishes this recipe yielded, I delivered a few to friends and coworkers, who had some bits of feedback (additional proofing time to capture the butter better and have a lighter pastry, thinner dough to decrease bready sections) but on the whole were overwhelmingly impressed by them. The slow-glazed apples in particular were well-received; one of my friends stopped mid-conversation to savor and comment after taking her first bite of the apple piece. I'm really glad people liked them, and I'm encouraged by how quickly the last few disappeared in my house; I'll be happy to revisit this recipe in the future after I've run the gauntlet of the other sections, or whenever I have extra fruit lying around! The recipe mentions that dried peaches or other fruit can be used as well, and my favorite danishes have cheese, so I'm excited to try swapping those fillings out in the future. 

Some thoughts for what went well and what to try next time: 

•  I thought these were actually a little better the next day, when all the moisture from the inside had a chance to soften the crisp outsides a bit.
• I'm unsure why my layers basically don't exist despite the lamination; I am finding a lot of butter leaking out, which the internet says is due to underproofing or butter being too cold during lamination and poking out through the dough, so I will try proofing longer or warmer next time, and not letting the beurrage get too cold before each turn. 
• The half-sheet was proofed without plastic wrap, and I think the outsides dried out a bit. The quarter-sheets were wrapped loosely, and I think they had more consistent browning on the outer layer.
  
• Some people thought the pastry was a little too sweet, some thought it could have used more sweet almond cream. I think I will compromise and, instead of adding the cranberry caramel paste underneath the apple in a potential distraction to add tartness, I will use a tart apple like granny smith next time. 
• I almost never egg wash pastries I make on my own before this, but it really goes a long way to making them look professional. Also, I did not know the stickiness on danishes comes from an extra simple syrup glaze!
• These took a long lead time, but the fact that they can be frozen after the filling is added and then thawed, proofed, and topped with fruit for a bake at a later date is a game changer; I could potentially make these and have them ready for a brunch after an overnight thaw.
  

Quotes of the day: "omfg this is arsicault level" "you're kidding me...right? You bought them at tartine." -feedback from a friend's roommate and one of my former coworkers. I'm grateful for the high praise and the opportunity to share the results of my baking with my friends!