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Week of Eating In: Homemade croissants
Making croissants from scratch isn’t exactly your average weeknight cooking activity.
Monday was the first day of the Week of Eating in Challenge, hosted by “The Art of Eating In” author Cathy Erway and the Huffington Post, and to kick off eating seven days in a row of eating only food that I have prepared, I hit both ends of the cooking spectrum: a lackluster sandwich for lunch and a dinner that included stuffed homemade croissants.
A few weeks ago, my husband, Ian, and I started a Monday night dinner tradition with our neighbors Buzz and Michelle Bakker. They both work in the service industry and love to cook, so they usually spend their day off on Monday cooking up something fabulous. I couldn’t let them do all the work this week, so I pitched in to make one of their favorite “trailer park” meals: speed bumps.
Every family in America has its version of speed bumps: that quirky, disgusting-sounding-but-delicious-and-easy-to-make meal that the kids downright beg for.
Michelle says she’s been making speed bumps — croissants or crescent rolls stuffed with a mixture of cream cheese and canned chicken or crab — ever since the day an old boyfriend’s kids asked her to make them. “I had no clue what they were talking about,” she says. “They finally explained that it was a dish their mother always made.” So Michelle had to buck up and call her boyfriend’s ex-wife for the recipe. “She reluctantly gave it up, and I’ve been making them ever since.”
Usually, when she’s using store-bought crescent rolls, speed bumps take about 15 minutes to assemble, but Buzz had been wanting to try them with homemade croissant rolls.
Buzz grew up in front of hot ovens. He worked at his father’s bakery in Aspen as a kid and ended up running his own bakeries in Utah and Colorado as an adult. Decades before Michael Ruhlman published his landmark baking book “Ratio,” Buzz kept the charts of all of his baking formulas, not recipes, in a now-yellowed three-ring binder that he still keeps on his kitchen shelf.
Loaves of bread were just the beginning of his love affair with food. He went on to work nearly every kind of restaurant job, which has turned him into a fabulous cook, but he’ll always be a baker, and not just because his last name says so.
He frequently dips into the 25-pound bag of bread flour in his pantry to make all kinds of homemade breads, but until yesterday, he hadn’t made croissants at home. (Probably has something to do with the thousands of them he’s rolled out by hand over the years.)
Here’s his recipe with step-by-step photos, followed by Michelle’s recipe for speed bumps:
Croissants
1 1/2 tsp. yeast
12 oz. bread flour (about 2 1/2 cups)
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 egg
1 cup milk (add milk slowly, you might need slightly more or less than this amount)
3/4 pound butter, softened
Buzz is faithful to his food processor. I usually made bread entirely by hand, but he makes a strong case for letting a magical Cuisinart do the work. Add yeast, flour, salt and egg to food processor and blend for a minute and a half with milk. “You have to know your textures,” he says, which is something you have to learn by doing, but beware that you’re looking for a softer-than-bread-dough texture for croissants.
Place the sticky dough on a floured surface, cover with flour and shape into a flat oval. Roll out dough into a large rectangle that is between 1/8- and 1/4-inch thick.
Using your hands, spread the butter over two thirds of the dough.
This is where the fun begins. Fold the unbuttered third over the middle, and fold the end third on top. Rotate the dough a quarter turn and roll out into a rectangle. Flour the surface as needed.
Now, mentally divide the dough into quarters and fold the outside quarters toward the middle and then fold in half. (Buzz calls this the book fold.) Roll out into a rectangle and repeat two more times, the final time leaving unrolled. Place in the fridge for 30-45 minutes to allow the dough to rest and butter to cool.
At this point, you have created layer upon layer of buttered dough, which give croissants their signature flakiness.
Roll the dough out into a rectangle one more time and cut in half lengthwise with a pizza cutter. Then cut out triangles with a slit in the short edge.
Taking the corners created by the slit, fold outward and begin rolling toward the triangle tip. An inch or two away from the end, pull gently on the pointy tip of the triangle to extend it and finish the roll. Tuck the corners together to create a circle.
Brush generously with an egg wash mixture (1 beaten egg mixed with a little milk) and let proof in a warm spot. (Buzz uses a dishwasher that has just been run.) Brush once more with egg wash and bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes. Keep an eye on them, Buzz says, because they can burn easily.
Speed bumps
1 brick cream cheese
1 can crab (You can also used canned chicken or salmon.)
1 small onion, diced
1/2 red bell pepper, minced
1/2 green bell pepper, minced
basil
dill
white pepper
oregano
Greek seasoning
garlic
2 packages crescent rolls (or homemade ones, if you’re up to it)
asparagus soup for gravy, thinned with milk.
In a bowl, combine cream cheese, crab, onion, bell pepper and spices. (The amount of spices is vague, Michelle says, because it depends entirely on what you like. She never measures and just does a dash of whatever she’s feeling like.) Let sit in the fridge so the flavors can meld. Unroll the packaged crescent rolls and combine two small dough triangles to create a larger one. Repeat with the rest of the dough.
Place a spoonful of the mixture onto the dough and roll up. Press the ends that stick out on the top of the roll so the mixture doesn’t melt out. Bake at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes.
While speed bumps are baking, heat asparagus soup in a small pan and add any seasonings you’d like. Michelle likes to add white pepper, basil and dill.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment Categories: Cooking
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By Brent D.
February 23, 2010 6:02 PM | Link to this
So if you make this “quirky, disgusting-sounding-but-delicious-and-easy-to-make meal that the kids downright beg for.”, on a Monday night.
Does that negate your right to criticize school lunch menus?
By staff
February 23, 2010 6:34 PM | Link to this
Brent, Do school lunch menus have ridiculously hyphenated modifiers? If so, then yes. Otherwise, I’m not quite sure what you mean. Addie
By Kristina W
February 23, 2010 9:35 PM | Link to this
Tomorrow is my day to stay in and bake & blog. I have always wanted to make croissants, you just nudged me into it. I love how easy you made the directions and pics. I also love the “speed bump” idea and I bet you could write a whole cookbook on fillings for those. Addie I enjoy your blogs/twitters and articles. Keep em coming!
By Brandi
February 24, 2010 10:02 PM | Link to this
I never would have thought these could taste so yummy except that I had a friend serve me a version of this, and…welll…ohhhmmmmmm. However, she used diced rotisserie chicken and green onions rather than peppers in her cream cheese mix. She also sealed the pockets entirely, and instead of a sauce she brushed a little melted butter on the prepared pockets and rolled them in chopped pecans. I’m not sure I’d care for it with the sauce as mentioned, but it was great with the pecans.
By Hanna
February 25, 2010 2:41 PM | Link to this
Wow, I’ve been fantasizing about making croissants for a while…I’m gonna work on a vegan version this weekend. Thanks for the how-to and the photos!
By kunde
May 8, 2011 10:24 PM | Link to this
Lots of excellent reading here, thank you! I had been checking on yahoo when I identified your post, I’m going to add your feed to Google Reader, I look forward to much more from you.