Learning to Laminate

Over the past few months I have been craving sweets and specifically donuts. I have a recipe from Alton Brown on making donuts but it makes 50 and once I started looking at dividing the recipe into a more manageable amount of donuts for two people I gave up. Valentine’s Day rolled around and Arielle decided to make Pots de Crème out of a baking cookbook we have. She had the book out to make a grocery list and I started flipping through the book. Everything looked so good but then I saw a braided chocolate pastry that looked good and would help fill this need for donuts. The dough used to make this braided chocolate pastry was Danish which I have never made before.

 

The Braided Chocolate Pastry

As I read the recipe I had to laminate the dough. So what is lamination? Lamination is the process of creating butter layers within the dough which is what makes Danishes and croissants flakey and airy. The basic process is you make a sheet of butter and wrap your dough around it so that the butter which is called the “package” is fully enclosed within the dough. Then you roll it out, fold the dough, and rotate the dough 90 degrees over and over until you end up with enough layers. The recipe I had only had four turns but it takes some time as you need to refrigerate 15 minutes between each lamination. Since the butter was always cold it seemed that it stayed in small pieces within the dough. I’m not sure how this is supposed to be done but I imagine the optimal way is to get full sheets of butter so it would make sense if the butter had time to melt a little more. You wouldn’t want the butter like a liquid in case there is a hole in your dough and then the butter would run out. On the last two of my four lamination runs I set the dough in the oven at 200 degrees for a few minutes to help melt the butter so that I would have more even butter layers.

 

Cross Section

My breakfast for the past few days

Overall it was a fun process since I had never done it before. If you are planning to laminate dough make sure that you have plenty of time to warm and cool the dough between each lamination. The braided chocolate pastry was a success and Arielle and I have been eating it for breakfast. I was really surprised at how good the texture was and it was very moist.