Much Better

This cross-section is from the second batch, following the two aforementioned letter-fold double turns and a full rise. These are the best homemade croissants I've made.

Kinda-Fail: Homemade, From-Scratch Croissants

It looks like my technique for attempting to make dairy-free croissants hadn't changed in over a decade. I'd make up a batch of puff pastry, roll it, and end up with under-baked dough in the resultant pastries. I've recently been following YouTuber Alex French Guy's croissant series, and realized early on that I wasn't going to bother with the more technically-intensive steps (like building a lamination device), but that I could reasonably aim for his recipe technique, which involves starting with a yeast bread and laminating that. I've had great success with the bread recipe from The Complete Guide to Cooking Techniques, and wanted to try using that dough as my jumping-off point. And so it was, with Kara home with a cold and all of us house-bound with blizzard conditions yesterday, I worked on a croissant dough.

Sadly, I suspect I didn't give the dough enough time to rest between rollings, and found that the croissants weren't "flaky", so much as pleasantly bread-like with odd cracker-like leaves. I gave the remaining half-batch of dough another two letter-fold turns this morning in the hopes that I'll have created a flakier pastry. We shall see. If this doesn't work as intended, I think I'll modify my technique so that I'm brushing or rubbing the fat between the layers, rather than trying to encase it. I'm thinking that the soy-free margarine I'm using, because it's softer than butter when refrigerated, just doesn't have the structure I need to keep it manageable, and that's affecting the texture.

Homemade veggie dumplings with whole wheat wrappers

On Sunday, I made a batch of veggie dumpling filling using onion, shallot, garlic, ginger, shitake and cremini mushrooms, and cabbage. Today, I made up a batch of whole wheat dumpling wrappers, using China Sichuan Food's Dumpling Wrappers recipe as my reference, but replacing ⅓ of the flour with whole wheat flour. I was able to use up ½ of the dough — creating twenty 16g wrappers — on the filling, freezing half of the batch for later.

The dumplings hit the spot and I think I'll use up the remaining dough on a batch of beef and onion filling I can make up with stuff in my pantry and freezer.