The window butter works in#
Croissants. Week 9 put butter in the dough. This week it stays out.
Two components, then one#
- détrempe — the yeasted dough, mixed yesterday, deliberately under-developed
- beurrage — 250 g of butter, pounded to a 16 × 16 cm square
The lock-in encloses the second in the first. Everything you do to the dough from then on, you do to the butter.
16–20 °C#
Below, it shatters and punctures the dough. Above, the flour absorbs it.
Four degrees wide, and both edges end lamination.
Why European butter bends#
82–84% fat against the supermarket block’s 80%.
The difference is mostly water, and water is what makes a cold block brittle. The 80% block is already cracking while the 82% block is still taking the shape you give it.
The fold arithmetic stops paying#
| Letter folds | Butter layers | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 9 | too coarse — thick, greasy layers |
| 3 | 27 | what we make |
| 4 | 81 | layers thinner than the dough can hold |
At 81 layers in a 3.5 mm sheet the butter ruptures and merges. More layers, fewer layers.
The rest is doing two jobs#
30–60 minutes in the fridge between every fold.
- stretched gluten relaxes, so the next roll does not fight back
- butter comes back up into its window
Roll on one axis only. Sideways passes stretch some layers and not others.
Proof at 24–26 °C, not 30#
Warm enough for the yeast. Below the point where butter stops being a solid.
A proofer at 30 °C looks faster. It is — the butter runs out of the layers and pools on the tray, and you bake a dense roll in it.
200–220 °C: the water does the work#
Butter is 16–18% water. In the oven it flashes to steam inside every layer and drives the dough above away from the dough below.
The yeast set the volume overnight. Steam sets the structure in four minutes, and the honeycomb is the record of it.