Own Croissants

Dear me, it really is the Year of Food. Last year was the Year of Wilderness Camping.  Last spring I loved to read guides to surviving in the wild, and now I am surrounded by cookbooks. I even have a cookbook geared to surviving in the wild--or, rather, in poverty in rural Greece.

Not being in poverty in rural Greece, on Saturday I had a pound coin with which to buy 250g of unsalted butter. Therefore, on Saturday night I made raw croissants and left them to prove in the fridge overnight. I awoke in a panic at 5 AM and moved them to the kitchen counter. At a more reasonable 7 AM, I woke up again and had a look. They had indeed doubled in size although I must admit they were not (and had not started) at uniform sizes. Getting a 20 cm x 65 cm rectangle of dough to the same thickness throughout was a challenge I met but imperfectly.

Into the oven they went for 25 minutes. I did them too brown (as Georgette Heyer would metaphorically write), so next time I will have a look after 20.

Even when overly brown, there is nothing like a  hot, freshly baked croissant straight from the oven, as I now know. The outer layers snap and flake, and the inner layers cling softly together until you pull them apart to apply the jam. You do not need to add butter. They are butter.

Various online wags say that after making your own croissants, you understand why there are bakeries. I wonder where the online wags live; it can't be suburban Scotland. It is a 30 minute bus ride to the nearest French bakery, and we consider ourselves lucky. Moreover, it costs less to make your own croissants (approx 10p each) than to buy even a bad, bready one from Tesco (approx £1).

Meanwhile, making croissants is not that difficult, especially if you add the butter in one-inch cubes instead of pounding it into a flat slab, as did Julia Child. The important thing is not to lose your nerve when the greasy dough sticks to your rolling pin. To avoid this problem, roll the dough between lightly floured sheets of baking paper. It will still stick, but don't panic.

Besides butter, flour, yeast, sugar, salt, milk, water, baking paper and a cool head, you need a refrigerator and time. The butter-studded dough needs about an hour to rise. The twice-turned dough-envelope needs about that (see recipe) to rest in the fridge, and then another hour for its second rest in the fridge. The crescent shapes need two hours (perhaps)  to double--unless you put them in the fridge overnight, as I recommend.  If you want croissants for breakfast, you have to start the night before, perhaps right after supper.

The long-term goal is to have croissants for breakfast, so the short-term goal should be to have the crescent-shapes in the fridge before you go to bed at your normal time. In the morning, you pop them on a counter/table, wait an hour for them to finish doubling, and then bake and eat them. This may mean getting up earlier than usual. As a morning person, I love the blissful solitude of being awake and busy before anyone else.

A problem I did not foresee is that 12 -14 croissants are too many for a middle-aged married couple, even over two days. (This morning's day-olds tasted great after being warmed in the oven.) Next time I will either freeze half of the proved-but-unbaked crescent shapes or I will wait until there are overnight visitors in the house. Of course, there is always the option of halving the recipe and making just six.  Rolling the dough to just 32.5 cm must surely be easier!

By the way, I didn't have plastic wrap to cover the dough, so I used a large white linen napkin throughout. French bakers thrived for at least three centuries without plastic wrap. I wonder how they coped without refrigerators, but presumably they had cellars.

The Friendly Alien Eats Edinburgh

My search for a good croissant led us this morning to The Wee Boulangerie, and there I hit buttery gold. Yes,The Wee Boulangerie sells plain croissants that taste like croissants and not--as they do perhaps everywhere else in Edinburgh--like bread. And they are NOT £3 a pop, as someone claimed on TripAdvisor. I do not know how much they are exactly, however, as B.A. ordered a pain aux raisins. Together our pastries came to £3.75. We ate them happily while wandering down Nicholson Street in the direction of Brew Lab.

Brew Lab, that hipster mecca of coffee, was not overcrowded, and so we sat and enjoyed an espresso (B.A.) and a macchiato (I) made with Has Bean beans imported from Kenya. B.A. sat in one of the red leather armchairs in the window and read The Spectator while I sat on a bench beside two philosophical young Poles and wrote a letter in Polish. I hope the Polish youths did not think I was recording their conversation, averting to the Collins Polish-English English-Polish dictionary when I got stuck on the spelling.

The letter having been written, B.A. and I went next to Central Library where I returned two books and took out five more. Then B.A. complained of the dizziness and double-vision that come upon him when he is hungry, so we went straight to Mother India's Café. There we ate a dhosa (lentil pancake) wrapped around spicy spinach and served with lentils; smoked chicken with peas; onion bhajis and pitta bread and drank a bottle of sparkling water. This tasty feast cost £19.75 + tip.

B.A. then proposed another coffee, so we decided to visit Baba Budan under the Waverley Arches after I picked up my new glasses from Specsavers. These are very special glasses that you can wear both to see the world in front of you and to read.  We took them to Baba Budan and ordered two filter coffees (£2 each) and sat on a bench. I read Ada i Adam na Wsi  aloud to B.A. using my new spectacles and was slightly nonplussed when I realized that the hipster girl crocheting in the armchair at my elbow was Polish.

Baba Budan is constructed on the usual hipster brick-and-board lines, only its ceiling is a bona fide stone archway and its walls are smooth and white. It advertises itself as a "donutterie", so I went back to the counter to buy a doughnut (a whopping £2.50 each) for BA and me to share. Baba Budan was down to passionfruit-mango and strawberry jam, so I picked the latter and it was TOO SWEET. Sugar is evil; I shall not do that again. Believe it or not, Goodfellow & Stevens offer a very decent chocolate-covered ring doughnut in supermarket bakery counters, so one need not search Edinburgh high and low for a good doughnut.

The coffee was served in round juice glasses, but we will not hold that against the café. It came from the Coffee Collective and was very good. The young ladies (Irish and Polish) beside us chatted amiably about taking each other on visits to Ireland and Poland and what their relations think of Lesbianism (e.g. fashionable, curable) and how, as these girls are Artists, their relations cut them some slack. I haven't seen these girls at Mass, but then perhaps they go to the Cathedral.

As B.A. and I were so close to Waverley Station, we took the train instead of the bus home, stopping at Co-op to purchase something for B.A. to eat later for supper. (I shall have a restorative mug of miso soup.) B.A. would have bought the boxed corned beef-with-mashed-potato dinner had he not noticed that it had something like 150% of his daily sodium requirements. He put it back with the haggis-and-mash and macaroni-and-mash (etc) boxes, and I reflected that the brand's motto could have been "Slowing killing Scots since 1904."

Skipping lightly over our supper prospects, we can reflect that we have had a very good foodie day. For croissants, we highly recommend  The Wee Boulangerie*. For a relaxed coffee, we vote for Brew Lab. For an excellent Indian lunch, we are all for Mother India's Café. For a quick coffee near Waverley Station, we give Baba Budan the nod although I didn't like the doughnut.

Update: B.A. made himself corned beef stovies according to his mother's recipe. It is composed of corned beef, mashed potatoes and a can of baked beans. Although B.A. refers to it as "Splodge", it is actually very tasty. Instead of having soup, I had a half-cup of Splodge and then began to make croissants according to Ruby Tandoh's recipe. If all goes well, B.A. and I will have homemade croissants for breakfast.

*Correction: Not La Petite Boulangerie but The Wee Boulangerie!

Croissanterie

Not being prepared to banish wheat flour entirely from my life, I have begun a mission to find Edinburgh's best croissant. This may be a difficult task, for I am used to the splendid croissants of French Canada and have encountered superlative croissants in Paris and so far no plain croissant in Edinburgh can compare. I have threatened on several occasions to make my own. It may still come to that.

Today I had a hazelnut croissant from Edinburgh's Twelve Triangles, and it was delicious. However, the plain croissant I had afterwards (the hazelnut croissant having disappeared in a frenzied attack), though good--and indeed aeons better than the horrors one gets from Costa Coffee, Caffé Nero, et al,, did not conjure up Montréal or the Chartres Pilgrimage.

The game's afoot!