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Sunday, July 30, 2023

Don't Forget the Croissants

Several months ago I thought of three things I wanted to Google. As each occurred to me (never while I was actually at the computer or apparently even within reach of a pen and paper), I would file it away mentally so I could retrieve it later from my brain. Well, you know how this is going to end up. I forgot all three of them.

 

And then, once a fortnight, one of them would pop into my head and I'd exclaim (silently but with all the excitement of an over-stimulated cartoon character), "Oh, that's what I wanted to look up! Now what were the others?" And then I'd forget that one and never recover the others.

 

Over the span of a recent week I caught hold of two of the three. I Googled how to make an amaryllis re-bloom and found out that I was about four months late to do it properly, but I took the bulb, thriving with its strappy leaves, to the basement and will deprive it of water and light just the same. It may work. It may not.

 

Remembering the second question made me even more excited. I've made croissants since I was twenty, though at intervals of a dozen years. But every time I bake them, the baking sheets are filled with butter that oozes out and melts (rather, "melts and oozes out"). I thought this was normal. But then I bought a bakery's frozen unbaked croissants and they didn't ooze butter as I baked them. So that was my Google question: why do my homemade croissants ooze melted butter?

 

And the answer popped up in a nano-second: they haven't been proofed long enough. And this made perfect sense to me. There were further explanations, but they didn't really pertain. So the next time I make croissants (and I can tell I'm about due because my taste buds are getting set and I'm checking the freezer to be sure we have the required 84% butter on hand)—anyway, the next time I'll proof them from frozen overnight in a cold oven. Then all that butter will stay in the roll and end up on my hips, the way it's supposed to.

 

 
 
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