One of my favorite pastries is the croissant.  They can be found at any coffee shop and pretty much any bakery.  I love the buttery, flaky layers that wrap around and around, but many croissants end up disappointing me.  They are either stale, not done in the middle, or not done enough on the outside.  I like the browned exterior bits the best, tasting almost like a crunchy version of a really richly browned pie crust.

I’ve only made croissants a few times, since it’s a lot of preparation.  The process itself isn’t difficult, just time-consuming.  As I learned this time, it really shouldn’t be rushed.  The recipe I follow is the small-batch version from the Professional Pastry Chef cookbook.  I highly recommend this book as a tome of great knowledge on just about any dessert from meringue to pastry cream, truffles to napoleons.

This batch of croissants didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked, but the basic idea is there, and despite their appearance they are delicious.  These are definitely not the best croissants I’ve made, but they meet what I like in a croissant.  They have a buttery and crispy flaky crust on the outside with just enough soft center to give a contrast.

First you knead butter with a little flour and lemon juice to soften it and give it a chance to stand up to the heat before melting out all over the place.

Next, make a pretty typical yeast dough.  It’s a softer dough than that for bread, and not kneaded as much so it stays much more tender.

Then you roll the dough out a bit bigger than the butter and place the butter on top with the corners of the butter square aligned with the sides of the dough square.  Note how my butter and dough are nowhere near square.

Enclose the butter in dough by bringing up the dough corners and pinching.  This is the first important part.  I always feel like if I don’t close it up right here that all the butter will run out at the slightest increase in temperature.  I think this is one of my first screw-ups, since I left some air pockets in there that ended up forming defects in the finished product.

Now roll it out into a “rectangle”.

Then you do a series of “turns” where you fold it like a brochure.  One third folds in from the left, then one third folds in from the right.  Bring it all together and turn it 90 degrees.  You’ll then roll it out and “turn” it a couple more times.

We’ve now created a laminated (layered) dough.  You start with 3 layers (dough, butter, dough), but in making the turns you create many.  After the first, you have 9.  After the second, 27, then 81, then 243, then 729.  The butter separates the layers of dough and the water within the butter creates steam which puffs it up.  This is how puff pastry gets its puff.

Once we’ve made the dough, it needs to rest in the fridge, but needs to be wrapped tightly, because if the dough dries out, things will crack and break and our butter will escape.

Once it’s rested, you’ll let it come up in temperature a bit, then roll it out, cut strips, then triangles for croissants or rectangles for pain au chocolat.  Roll them up, brush with a beaten egg, bake in a hot oven and try to wait until they’re cool to enjoy any time of day.

My problem was in rushing the process.  There are supposed to be more waiting periods of chilling and/or resting the dough.  I think it would have helped my croissants get bigger.  I also cut them too small, but that just means it’s easier to have more than one!

Chocolate chip cookies are probably the most classic American dessert after apple pie.  You can get them at any grocery store, coffee shop, or even freshly baked at a bakery, but the best chocolate cookies are the ones you make at home.  In part, it’s because it’s a recipe anyone can do with minimum equipment and little investment.  I’m sure you’ve tried the ubiquitous Toll House recipe printed on the back of the chocolate chip bag, and those are good, if only because it means people are getting back into the kitchen and baking real cookies.  As you grow up, though, maybe you want a cookie that’s a touch more refined.

Enter Thomas Keller, chef and restauranteur of such three-Michelin-star restaurants as the French Laundry and per se.  He’s written a few cookbooks in the past, with recipes coming from the menus of those restaurants.  He has another cookbook coming out in November based on his family-style comfort food restaurant, ad hoc.  This book, he promises, is geared toward the home cook.  It has recipes that you’ve had, maybe even made, before–biscuits, pot pie, beef Stroganoff.  I don’t have any inside info on all the contents, since I don’t have a press kit, but Food Gal Carolyn Jung got one.  Lucky for us, she shared a few recipes, including one for grown up chocolate chip cookies.  Go to her site for the full recipe for Thomas Keller’s chocolate chip cookies.

There are a few big differences to this recipe from most chocolate chip cookie recipes.  First is in the ingredient list–there’s no vanilla!  Now, you could certainly add some, but the large amount of brown sugar in this recipe gives the cookies a more grown-up molasses flavor rather than the more in-your-face vanilla kick most cookies have.

Next is the chocolate.  The recipe calls for chopping up two different types of good chocolate.  I did this the first time I made these and the different flavors from the chocolate make the cookies much more interesting.  This may add a few dollars to your cookie budget, but it is well worth it.  You could use chips as I did this time, but I really recommend trying it with good chocolate as the recipe recommends.  Please, don’t use milk chocolate, and if you’re going with chips, don’t use the Nestle morsels.  Use at least a half-way decent chocolate, like 60% Ghirardelli chips.

At a glance, the mixing instructions are a little different, telling you to add the butter in stages and beating it very thoroughly.  I think the intent here is to make sure that you cream it enough, beating enough tiny bubbles into the butter that will expand later as they bake.  Other than that, the rest of the ingredients and the procedure are really the same as any other cookie recipe.

When I make cookies, I like to chill the dough a bit until it’s firm, but not completely hard.  Taking a tip from Alton Brown, I use a scooper to dish out my dough evenly.  Even scooping means they cook evenly and end up about the same size.

I made a double batch and handed some out to some friendly food fans.  After all, who can resist home baked cookies (especially when you’re not doing the work)?  I got a lot of positive comments on them.  In my family, these are our new favorite chocolate chip cookie.

I was uploading other photos and saw this one again.  I really love this picture (enough that I have a 5×7 on the wall).  Sometimes it’s fun to take a close look at your food.  These were being prepped for use in carrot halva (gajar ka halva), an Indian dessert which I’ll have to write up in the future.  Until then, enjoy looking at these colorful nuts.

I’ll post more on tempering chocolate soon.

So far we’ve seen the raw cacao beans and the roasted nibs they become.  To continue in the series of how local chocolate maker, Dan Schreiber, is making his product, we must transform the nibs into what any lay-person would call “chocolate”.

Many commercial chocolate makers will use stainless steel grinders and milling devices.  This certainly produces a uniform, tightly controlled product.  Dan, like other artisanal bean-to-bar operations, is using stone.  Granite and other stones have been used to grind chocolate (among other things) for thousands of years, though it wasn’t until almost 1800 that a machine-powered mill was invented.  Today you can buy a table-top stone grinding machine that will do a very nice job, as you will see.

In reality, Dan is combining a couple processes here.  He’s milling, or grinding, the nibs and sugar together, and he’s also refining and conching his chocolate.  Grinding does a few things.  Obviously, it’s grinding down the nibs into smaller pieces.  This process, due to the friction involved, generates heat which helps to liquefy and emulsify the fat (cocoa butter) that is naturally found in the cacao.  If you just grind cacao beans, you will get what’s referred to in the business as “chocolate liquor.”  According to the great Wikipedia, this contains about 53% cocoa butter (the rest is cocoa solids).

Sugar can be added at this point, to be ground and mixed together with the cacao.  The idea being that you want the individual particles of sugar and cacao to be the same size, evenly distributed, and all coated with cocoa butter.  The grinding and refining take a long time; a day on average.  What you end up with looks, smells, and tastes like chocolate.

I took these pictures of Dan’s chocolate grinding.  The one on the left is without a flash, and probably better reflects the true color of the dark chocolate inside.  The one on the right was with flash, and shows how shiny the chocolate was with all the melted cocoa butter inside.  I slightly prefer the no-flash version for its softer, more natural look, but you can choose for yourself.  As always, click for a larger version.

Dan’s been experimenting with different grinding times and considering temperature manipulation as well.  You know how I mentioned that it gets hot from all the friction?  That’s great, to a point, but with heat and friction comes conching.  As the chocolate is conched, it becomes more and more uniform, but also less… unique.  Conching is usually necessary to a point, as it drives away undesirable flavors and unwanted astringency.  The heat involved can adjust some of what the chocolate maker did (or didn’t) achieve in the roasting process.The chocolate Dan made this day was the same variety as an earlier batch, but was ground and conched longer.  It lost some of the unique flavors as they were ground and heated away.  It’s yet another sign of how processing food more tends to detract from flavor.  That said, it was still damn good chocolate, just not as unique or as interesting as the earlier batch that was ground less.

Finally, when the chocolate was sufficiently ground/refined/conched, he poured it into a holding vessel in preparation for tempering.  That’s the next stop in our chocolate journey, after we lick our fingers (and wash up again).

Lauren, of Genki Tummy, guessed right away that the mystery picture in yesterday’s post was cacao beans.  If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you’ve probably seen my mention of the local food lover and entrepreneur, Dan Schreiber.  When we last saw Dan, he was getting prepared to start up bean-to-bar chocolate production.  He’s been posting about his experience on his own blog, artisanal thinking.  I had an opportunity to hang out with him and help a little in creating his most recent batch.

The first step, obviously, is to obtain the raw cacao.  He is currently buying fair-trade, organic beans online in small(ish) quantities.  The beans look like dusty rocks, and the smell is… funky.  This funky smell comes from the fermentation they go through to develop their flavors.  He cracked one open and urged me to try it.  It didn’t have much flavor yet, but that’s mostly because…

Once he gets them, he needs to roast them.  For now, he’s roasting them in a conventional oven on baking sheets.  The roasting not only brings out more of the roasty chocolate flavor of the beans, but it drives off some of the delicate flavors of the chocolate.  This can be good or bad, depending on the qualities of the beans he has and the desired effect in the eventual bar.

After roasting, he performs a process of cracking and winnowing.  Cacao beans have a papery husk on the outside that doesn’t contribute anything to the chocolate, so it needs to go.  There are lots of ways of doing this, and since I wasn’t there to see how Dan does it I have to assume he’s using some sort of high-tech, top-secret, ultra-experimental winnowing method using a hair dryer.

Once the beans are roasted, cracked, winnowed, and cooled, they can be considered nibs.  At this point, they are edible and taste like chocolate.  You can use nibs in a lot of ways, but for now we’ll focus on making a bar of chocolate.  The nibs have intense flavors showcasing the terroir of each variety of bean (he’s currently using two different varieties).  In one, acidity and floral notes highlight smooth chocolate.  In the other, a deep, dark, complex chocolate experience.  These flavors will change over the course of a long grinding process in his melangeur, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Enjoy this picture of a jar of delicious nibs, and next time will be a quick post on grinding and conching and sugar, oh my.