.:: Fire The Housewife ::.

So I finally got that pastry baking down to something beside creme puffs. Though those will always be my first pastry love. I have had many adventures in the past few days (look forward to a picture of me in a welding helmet . . . actually welding) and will be posting those soon.

But today, OH TODAY. I’m going to show you my beautiful Pain au Chocolat. Dad gave this his seal of approval, it was delicious. Now, it’s a little labor intensive, so 1. not only are there not many pictures of the steps, 2. if you’re going to attempt this please note that this is something like 14 hours of prep work for like . . . 5-10 pastries. If you have the time though, it’s TOTALLY worth it.

Heres what you’ll need . . .

1 1/2 c. milk

1/3 c. brown sugar

1Tbsp and 1/4 tsp active dry yeast

3 3/4 – 4 1/2 c. flour (you’ll be continuously adding flour as needed, start with the 3 3/4, build up as needed)

1 Tbsp salt

3 sticks butter

Okay, to make your dough you’re going to first scald your milk, don’t boil it, but get it to about 110degrees then take it off the heat, mix in a bowl with brown sugar and yeast, let it stand about 5 minutes to get foamy. Start working on your other stuff.

Mix flour and salt, add your yeast mixture when it’s all foamed up.

Knead by hand for 2 minutes, adding more flour as needed. This stuff is pretty freaking sticky, so don’t worry when it’s a huge nasty mess. Use a lot of flour on your surface as you knead. Okay, so you’re going to wrap this up in some plastic wrap, and stick it in the fridge for an hour.

one hour later…

This is the weird part, but also the awesome part. Take out your three sticks of butter, get out your rolling pin, BEAT THE HELL OUT OF THE BUTTER UNTIL YOU CAN ROLL IT OUT FLAT. You want to make an 8×5 rectangle out of it. Put your rectangle on a towel, not a terrycloth towel though, you need one of those linen-y kitchen towels. then put the towel of butter in the fridge while you roll out the dough.

Okay, so now take that dough out of the fridge, you’re going to use your rolling pin to mash it down a little, make little uniform indentions. Then roll it out into a 10×16 rectangle (if you’re as big a stickler as me, you cook with a ruler, I had to was a ruler that was covered with butter after this experience. Don’t tell Dad but I totally used one of those really nice drafting rulers he has around the house. Shhhhh)

Okay, so once your rectangle is made of dough, get the butter out, and lay it inside the dough, you want to put the short side of the butter parallel to the long sides of the long sides of the dough. then you’re going to fold the bottom third up over the butter and the top 1/3 down over the dough you just folded up. Then you’re going to roll out the dough again. Then you’re going to fold it up again into a rectangle, rewrap it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge.
You’re going to follow that basic procedure 4 more times with an hour of chilling between. Then after your 4th fold you’re going to put it in the fridge for 8 hours.

Okay, then when you’re done you’re ready for forming and baking, which is where my pictures come in.

So basically what you do here is make some rectangles out of your dough, I used a pizza cutter to slice mine, it worked like a charm. You’ll probably need to roll it out some more and stretch it a little. In the center of it put some chocolate chips, as many as you think you’d like, I like to put a solid line in the middle because I like lots of chocolate in mine. Some of the other testers said they would have preferred less chocolate. After you’ve added your chocolate it’s just a matter of folding it like before, make sure when you put it on your cookie sheet you put the side with the fold down so it doesn’t come open during baking.

Before you bake it, make an egg wash to baste over the top. Egg wash = 1 egg 1-2Tbsp water, whisked. Then just use your dad’s fancy new silicone baster to put it on top, Now, usually when I’ve made stuff there is a major freakout if you get the egg on the pan because it keeps it from rising, I got some egg wash on the pan, but it totally still rose. I wouldn’t do it on purpose, but if theres an accidental egg washing, don’t worry too much about it.

Then bake at 375 for 20-ish minutes. Just watch for the top to turn golden brown and delicious. Then eat them all up in all their buttery fatty obesity causing glory.

 

 

ET VOILA!

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 5:23 am and is filed under Sweet Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.