Duo of Kouign Amann
“Ah stupid Americains,” he mumbled under his breath in the long drawn out insulting sneer that the French have perfected. He was always frustrated by us, whether he perceived we weren’t working fast enough or didn’t have enough dedication. He had recently arrived from France to run the pastry department in the high-end restaurant in Los Angeles where I worked as a pastry cook. His name was Christophe.
L.A. was deep into the local and seasonal produce movement where pastry was esteemed for its flavor rather than how it looked. Christophe’s refined style focused on appearance and used frozen fruit purees, gaudy food coloring and tools such as pastry combs to create colorful bands of tasteless, striped cakes. This was a style of pastry that was new to us and that we didn’t really support...because they didn’t taste good.
Nonetheless, I learned that he had trained at the famed Fauchon Bakery in Paris and had worked under the esteemed Pierre Hermé, a famed French pastry chef who had himself apprenticed under the legendary Gaston Lenôtre, a founding father of modern French patisserie. I decided that this was my chance to study and hone classic technique.
During each shift we piped thousands of French macarons of every garish hue, spread hundreds of sheets of genoise with bands of color running perfectly throughout, layered cakes with joconde, whipped mousse au chocolat, froze bombe glacée with jarring layered flavors of red fruit, and made tiny chocolate petit fours and pates de fruits. Over and over we went, practicing every day. Eventually, Christophe and I began to trust one another. I respected his attention to detail and executed whatever he put on my prep list. So one day I asked him if he would teach me the way to make proper French croissants. And he did.
To this day, the croissants that we make in the bakery are a variation on what I learned from Christophe. Croissants are tedious and temperamental. They take technique, practice, repetition and a great deal of intuition. The success of croissants depends on three criteria: 30% is the recipe, 30% is the lamination process, and 40% is the proof and the bake. We obey the rules during the making of the pastries, and we push all the boundaries on the bake. Then hopefully from the oven emerge the croissants; feathery interior layers of tender pastry encased in a lacquered shattery crust of crisp butter.
This weekend we are using our croissant dough to reintroduce one of the Bakeshop favorites - Kouign Amann. These beautifully decadent pastries derive from the Brittany region of France, and their name comes from the Breton words for cake (kouign) and butter (amann). We create them from a croissant dough traditionally made with salted butter which is then layered with sugar and baked until caramelized. For the Secret Item this weekend we have a duo of Kouign Amann -- one a classic caramelized version, and another filled with a deep, dark chocolate ganache. Available for our newsletter subscribers only, so be sure to join our email list for access to all of our weekly specials.