Giant croissants. Kouign Amann. Flaky pastry with buttery and crispy layers. I love laminated pastries, but every time I decide to give it a try, the process intimidates me, so I end up just getting my fix by purchasing a bag of frozen delights from The Milk Pail Market in Mountain View, toss them on a sheet to rise overnight, and bake in the morning. If you haven't tried their croissants or other frozen pastry items, you must.
One of my dear friends, who is also an avid baker, recently took a French pastry class in San Francisco and learned the tricks of the trade. After much of my hassling and offerings of wine in exchange for a 1:1 lesson, we finally managed to find a date that worked for us both and started with a classic: the Palmier, also known as Elephant Ears. In order to ease into it, we used a rough puff pasty recipe from The Art and Soul of Baking. This technique felt more like a gateway into the more elaborate puff pastry process, as you work small chunks of butter into the flour, much like a pie dough. That said, it still required much precision, folding, rolling, chilling sessions to get the fun part of shaping and baking the Palmiers. The entire process, end-to-end, took about 5 hours, so this still isn't for the faint of heart and requires you set aside some significant time. That said, we maximized our time by not only drinking wine and eating good food, but also whipping up batches of Faux Disney Dole Whip ice cream, no-cook pineapple syrup, and toasted sugar during the down time, but also making enough dough to store in the freezer for on-demand Palmiers.
Now that I have a little more confidence in the process, I am going to brush the dust off my copy of Bouchon Bakery and try making a true puff pastry. Stay tuned.
