teonzo

Exactly, same considerations apply for puff pastry too. With a small exception. You want to avoid rolling a laminated dough where the butter layers are cold and over a certain width. This applies to croissant dough during all stages. For puff pastry it applies for the first turns. Once you do the 4th turn you can refrigerate it overnight, not many troubles after that because the butter layers are really thin at that stage. But it's always better to start and finish in one sitting. Once puff pastry is finished you can store it in the refrigerator and roll it / shape it the next day. Teo

Those eggs are made with corn. Teo

These croissants have 2 troubles: laminating and shaping. If you look at the outside (how the layers develop along the cut side of the dough) and the inside, you notice that lamination is not consistent. There is a part of the final dough that has a correct division of first dough and butter, then a part where there is not lamination, this is repeated all over due to the turns and the shaping. This can be the result of many possible errors: you rolled it uneven; the dough broke in some partd and the layers fused together; when making the first "envelope" (when you place the butter inside the first dough) you left too big sides out of the butter. To correct this it takes lot of practice, especially if you are doing it by hand. Shaping was not correct, the triangles were too thick before forming the croissants. You see this by the point end of the triangle (the big point on the top of the final croissants), it's too thick if compared with the rest of the body. A couple more suggestions. Work with at least 600 g flour (double your recipe), this will help you during the lamination. When working with too small a batch it's much much more difficult to get even lamination. This will lead to more croissants, you freeze them and you are happy. Work with defined measures during all stages. When you envelop the butter, you want the dough and the butter to have exact measures. Same when doing the turns. When you give the final roll (before cutting the triangles) it's better to aim to get a rectangle with defined measures, X inches large and Y inches high. This way the dough will always have the same width, automatically. Triangles will have the same measures, so the final croissants will always be the same. When shaping the croissant it's better to pull the point end of the triangle, to make it thinner than the rest of the body. After rolling the triangle to get the croissant, always lay the final croissant with the point of the triangle on the bottom side, so it's in contact with the pan and will remain so during proofing and baking. If it's not in contact with the bottom of the pan then it will spring up. Teo

Maybe we intend something different with the word "disgusting". All dried wgg whites taste/smell like old eggs (there's a word in Italian language just for this, that has no translation in English, at least I could not find one), which is not pleasant (aka "disgusting"). You detect it if you reconstitute the whites and don't add much stuff, if you start adding other ingredients then it gets covered. As far as I know there are no dried egg whites on sale which do not have this taste/smell (I've never been happy to open a bag of dried egg whites, don't like that smell). If you say you found "good" dried egg whites and "disgusting" ones, then this should mean that the disgusting ones were ones that went bad, so the seller gave you a defective product. As far as producers, most stuff that is sold here is not on sale in the USA. Sosa products are, their Ovoneve (brand name for dried egg whites) is reliable. For your use, you are totally correct to avoid bringing fresh raw eggs in a chocolate kitchen, much better to avoid these risks. But you would get better results starting with pasteurized egg whites, not the dried ones. You run no risks with pasteurized egg whites, they are safe. After baking they are even safer. Pasteurized egg whites whip better than reconstituted whites (water + dried egg whites), plus you avoid the hassle of mixing the dried ones with water and wait some times for them to hydrate. I haven't understood what you are aiming to achieve. The original marjolaine is made with dacquoise, which has a soft texture, it's more similar to a biscuit joconde than to a meringue. The original marjolaine gets clean cuts, it would not be possible if the dacquoise layers were cooked farther and become crisp (meringue-like). Using a soft dacquoise in a bonbon is not advisable, for the usual aW troubles. If you make a gelatin based marshmallow then you should pipe it in the bonbon without baking. If you bake it then gelatin is going to melt in the oven, leading to loss of shape and other troubles. I would suggest to use the original dacquoise recipe, then baking it more than it's done for the original marjolaine, until the dacquoise becomes crisp like a meringue. I suppose you are going to make small rounds of this to add as a layer in molded bonbons, right? If so, then how are you forming the disks? Spread a layer of dacquoise, cook it, cut the circles while soft, then put again in the oven to get crisp? Or are you piping the circles directly by hand on the parchment paper? To speed up this process you can buy a dedicated chablon: it's a piece of plastic the size of a pan, with shaped holes all over it. It should be easy to find a chablon that suits your needs, there are lots of sizes for chablons with round holes. Teo

Now you are forced to make the pie on the cover and post the results in the Crusty Chronicles. Teo

You are succumbing to your genes. Teo

If you rolled it after a night in the fridge then it's almost impossible to avoid ruining the dough. If you start rolling when the outer zones become pliable, then the inner zones still have hard butter, this will tear the layers while rolling. If you wait until the inner zones are pliable then the outer zones will have butter that is too soft, which leads to greater troubles. If you want to prepare the dough in advance, then you are forced to shape the croissants in advance. Here you have 2 choices: refrigerate them, but try making only half proof in the refrigerator, not the full proofing; freezing, then defrosting and proofing, this takes some experimentation to find the correct timing for your environment. If you freeze it, then raise the yeast amount in the recipe. In the first picture you reached almost perfect results, so I don't see any need to change ingredients or recipe or anything. Just keep going with what you have, being careful about not letting the butter to get hard during the turns and the shaping: once you start the first turn, you need to go on until you have the shaped croissants. I would advise against using flour with really high W, or pizza flour. For croissants you need medium high W, around W 320, not higher. You also need the correct p/l value, can't remember the exact number for croissants. For sure pizza flour is unsuitable for croissants, it has the wrong p/l value. Pizza flour must have really extensible gluten, this would lead to flat croissants. Flour for croissants needs both extensibility and tenacity, so it needs to have a different p/l value. To achieve high croissants (with an almost round section) you need to be careful when you mix the first dough (the simple dough without the butter inclusion). Your goal is to mix it the less possible, stop when the gluten start developing. If you continue mixing to get full gluten development (just like you would do for bread) then you are going way over the optimal results. Remember that you are going to make the turns, they strongly impact the gluten develpment. If you mix the first dough too much then during the turns you are going to overwork the gluten matrix, leading to its collapse. Teo

Seems like you are making a mistake at some point, but it's impossible to say where without watching what you are doing in person. The first suggestion that comes to mind is trying to reduce the sugar quantity. The caramel should be just enough to coat the nuts and nothing more. If there is more caramel in the pan, then it will act as glue no matter what. So if you are caramelizing too much sugar for the nuts you are adding, then this can be the source of the trouble. Beware that the sugar quantity does not depend only on the nuts weight, but also on their size and shape. The bigger the nuts, the smaller the total surface per weight. Teo

I fear you will always be disappointed. Teo

Easter eggs. Teo

Seems like a case where the butter hardened and it cut through the dough layers while rolling. It could have happened during the turns before the night in the fridge, or during forming after the night in the fridge. When you put it in the fridge did you roll it to the final width? Or did you roll it after the night in the fridge? It's better to shape croissants just after the turns, just to avoid this trouble. Teo

If my memory is right there was something along these lines in the WD50 book by Wylie Dufresne. You should try reading it if you can. Teo

She needed a photo to be convinced to buy a new toy? Where are we going??? Teo

Add some butter when they are still in the pan, before moving them on a tray. Teo

I tried that without much satisfaction: I needed tons of mint, results were not consistent, taste was a bit muted. I tried even the method of grinding the leaves with sugar. That is my favourite for most herbs (bay leaf, savory, rosemary...) but not for mint. I even tried sous vide at 70°C. After all these tries I decided for the method I wrote. Can't say if it works for all the other mint subspecies. There are literally dozens of subspecies, and a lot of confusion about their names. I tried to get a grasp of them a couple times and ended up with huge headaches, all the sources I checked had contradictions. So I just decided to call it a day, keep the kind I like, call it a generic "mint" and done. Teo

If you are dealing with a standard cookie dough (not a fluid batter like the one for macarons) then it's impossible to get uniform cookies, you need to press the dough down whatever way you can. The big wood spatula worked best for us. No chocolate chunks in the world peace cookies we made. I called them world peace cookies because I knew these cookies before going in that pastry shop, but they were using a recipe from a course, not the original one. Seemed like the 10th passage from Hermé to pastry chef 1, then to pastry chef 2, so on. In their version the chocolate was melted, not in chunks. The ratios were exactly the same ones of the world peace cookies, that was the only difference (which seemed like a mistake made during one of the passages). The method was this: mix butter with sugar; add melted chocolate (untempered, around 35°C) and mix; add the powders (flour, cocoa powder, salt, chemical leavening), previously sifted together, then mix. Recipe scales up perfectly, I made 27 kg batches. Absolutely no troubles with the depositor, they cut like a charm, unless the dough got cold. They spread quite a bit during baking, so they should reach your 50mm goal. With shortbread it's hard to get it spreading that much. The ones I did had almost no spread, they kept their shape perfectly. You would need to use more butter, probably whip it to add air, then add a good amount of leavening (I'm not a fan of leavening in shortbread). About business, the usual trouble is finding people willing to buy your product. If they succeed in this, then those machines are great for profits. If they have a good market for macarons then they are the best choice, macarons are a goldmine. Only problem is finding the oompa-loompas to fill and sandwich the macarons: spend a couple days sandwiching thousands of macarons and you'll feel more braindead than a zombie. Teo

To get the pie upside up on the serving plate you just need one more serving plate. First you flip it upside down like you are doing. Then you put a second serving plate on the top of the upside-down pie, flip both plates (with the pie in the middle), remove the first plate (that now is up) and you end up with your pie upside up. Plus one more plate to clean, so not much sense in doing it. Teo

I don't have direct experience with the Polin machine, but I have with a depositor by FBM which is almost the same machine with a different computer. Wire cutting is tricky, takes a bit of experience to control it. You need recipes with pretty high butter content, around 60-80%. You need to follow the pâte sucrée method: start with warm and soft butter (22-24°C), almost on the verge of melting; add the sugar and mix as little as possible; add the liquids (whole eggs, egg whites, whatever) and mix as little as possible; add the powders (flour, cocoa powder, whatever) and mix as little as possible. You don't want to add air to your dough, so you don't want to whip the butter. Mixing must be as little as possible, both to not whip the butter and to avoid gluten development. Your goal is to end with a dough that's really soft but not much sticky. Temperatures are really important. Your ingredients must be at room temperature, otherwise the dough will become too stiff. If you add liquids from the fridge (4°C) and flour from a storage room at low temperature (10°C) then you lower too much the final temperature of the dough, so the butter will get too hard. Your room temperature must be warm, not cold and not hot, ideally around 21-22°C. If your room is over 24°C then the dough will be too soft and the butter will start to melt partially, creating disaster. If your room is under 18°C then it's pure nightmare. Same with your machine, especially the die you are using. If you are using a cold die then the part of the dough in contact with the die will get hard and stop moving down, while the dough in the center will keep warm and continue moving down, so you'll end up with a domed cookie instead of a flat one, which will cause uneven baking and lots of waste. The big problem with this machine is that the dough will need some help to move down through the rollers then to the die. Especially the sides of the machine: the central cavities will give higher cookies than the ones on the sides. Different heights mean uneven baking, so you'll end up with the upper and lower rows that are overcooked when compared with the central rows (waste). We solved this with a big wooden spatula: you pour the dough in the hopper, start the machine, then pick the spatula and press it on the dough with quick up-down movements, helping the dough to go down through the rollers. Ideally you start from one side on the hopper and end to the other side during each cutting cycle, so it takes a bit of experience and coordination. The lower end of the spatula must be perpendicular to the rollers, otherwise you risk it going between the rollers, so the spatula will break and you'll have to bin all the dough. This is not the best solution since it's a bit risky on the safety side (you don't put your hands inside the hopper, but still you are putting a spatula inside something you should not), but it's the only way to get even rows of cookies. About programming, wire cutting is pretty easy, you just need to find the correct speed and time. Time is dependant on the rollers speed, meaning you can vary the rollers speed, then change the time and you can get perfect cookies every time. So this depends on how soft is the dough and how quick you want to work. The quicker you program the rollers the more probable you'll get some errors. The slower you program the rollers, the more time it will take to form a pan, which means higher costs. Aim for something in the middle. About dimensions, I suggest to weigh the full pan after depositing it, not a single cookie. This way you have more precision. Write down your aimed final weight (say 800 g for 48 cookies) and check every now and then (about every 10 pans) to control you are being consistent. No matter what you do you will need to keep adjusting every time you make again those cookies, the variables are so many (especially temperature) that you will always need to fine tune the program to get your aimed final weight. With wire cutting it's better to go with the single cycle (one pan at a time). Put a pan, start the machine, pick up the spatula, press it on the dough, when the pan is done put it on the rack, repeat. I don't have experience with cookies formed with the pastry tips. You need higher butter content for them (80-100%) and to use whipped butter recipes. Wire-cut cookies are much easier to form, bake and package. I made tons of macaron shells. With them you need to go in the continuous way, one pan after another without pauses, otherwise the batter will drip down the pastry tips, creating a huge mess. You can't avoid making a mess, no hope, but with macaron shells you want to go quick and continuous without stopping. Swiss meringue is your favourite choice here. Those machines are big moneymakers. All alone I arrived to make 100 kg of cookies (world peace cookies by Hermé / Greenspan, the chocolate + salt ones) in one day. Not only forming, I did everything alone: scaling, mixing, forming and baking. With a guy assisting me (mixing the batter and managing the oven, so he was not full time with me) we made the shells for over 6000 macarons in one day. Big profit margins there. Teo

I was very surprised too the first time! I was always been taught that puff pastry needs 200°C / 390F or more otherwise it won't rise. I even tried, just for personal curiosity, to cook puff pastry at lower temperatures and always got a failure. Then a couple years ago I saw a pastry chef cooking allumettes (the small rectangles of puff pastry with royal icing on them) at 165°C for 1 hour and they came out better than ever. So that rule proved to be not accurate. The trick here is using the convection oven (I tried without convection and it failed) and wait for enough time (which is longer than you think, the outside will reach your desired color before the pastry is completely cooked, but if you go on you won't burn the outside because you are at the limit of the burning temperature). Teo

Visually you made the best choice possible, those look wonderful. I think that having the 2 distinct layers is much better for the consumer, people can choose which layer to get with each bite, if you mix the layers you limit this choice. Besides that, it's the best visual appearance, at least to my eyes. About star anise, if you can make the infusion with the whole spice then it's the better choice for the visual. If you add the ground star anise then the pineapple layer will turn brown... a strong yellow like the ones in the photo is a much better color. I'm glad you liked my suggestions! Teo

I bring some milk to the boil, add the fresh mint leaves, wait for about 1 minute, blitz with an immersion blender, then strain it, weigh the remaining flavoured milk and proceed with the recipe. Cooking the mint for 1 minute is long enough to avoid the oxidization problem and quick enough to avoid the "cooked" flavour. Blitzing the leaves with the immersion blender helps you to extract more flavour, then you strain it to discard the fibers (which lost most of their flavour). This is my favourite way both about taste and consistency. Personally I can't stand peppermint oil, it tastes "fake". Teo

Besides the other suggestions, you can try coating the inclusions with a fat. Best choice would be spraying them with cocoa butter, but you would need a compressor and a spray gun. Otherwise you can melt some butter and coat the inclusions with it. For example if you want to add pieces of broken cookies, you can melt some butter in a bowl, add the cookie pieces, toss them until they are coated, then spread on a piece of parchment paper and let the butter harden in the fridge. Teo

When the puff pastry remains raw in the inside and especially at the bottom, then you can try cooking it at 325 F (convection, no steam) for 1 hour or longer. This way the puff pastry has time to cook completely and the temperature is not as high to burn the outside. I'm surprised you haven't posted a single quiche with frog legs until now. Teo

If you can get them directly from the plant then all the better! Fresh fruit has always a better taste. I buy the ones that are cultivated in Sicily, so they were harvested at least 2 days prior, I envy you! You can prepare the puree and freeze it for the rest of the year. It's tasty to drink as it is, but you can use it for lots of stuff, like sorbets, mousses and so on. If you use it with gelatin then remember to boil it, it has protelotic enzymes that dissolve gelatin when the puree is not cooked. I think they are an under-appreciated fruit, they have lots of potential. I especially like how they pair with warm spices (cloves, mace, cinnamon...). You can try them with lime and chile, or with some herbs like bay leaf and rosemary. Teo

The jury asks for a video to prove it. Teo