Source
Exploratory Kitchen
Yield: 12 Croissants
Active Time: 4 hours
Total Time: 3 days
Equipment
Standing mixer
Rolling pin
Ingredients
1 batch of basic croissant dough
125g all-purpose flour
35g water
35g whole milk
14g granulated sugar
10g softened unsalted butter
3g active dry yeast
3g salt
17g freeze dried strawberries, ground
Procedure
- To my standing mixer, equipped with the dough hook, I added the flour, water, milk, sugar, softened butter, yeast, salt, and strawberries. Then I let my mixer run on low speed for 5 minutes. Because of how little dough there was, the mixer was not effective and I switched to hand kneading. To counteract the extra flour required and the dried strawberry powder, I added a bit of water to the dough as I worked it.
- When the croissant dough was ready, I simply rolled out this colored dough to about 1/4 inch thickness before pulling the croissant dough from the fridge. The colored dough was placed on top of the croissant dough so that the croissant dough was fully covered before rolling them both out and shaping as desired. Treat the colored dough the same as part of the croissant dough. The baking time and instructions were not altered for the two toned croissants.
Results
In terms of generally creating the two-toned effect this experiment was successful. It was a great proof of concept for creating this effect. Unfortunately, flavoring this dough was less successful.
I had hoped to add a bit of flavor and color using freeze dried strawberries but unfortunately the strawberries ended up absorbing a lot of water which left the dough tough and it lost its elasticity. What I was left with was A dough that cracked as the croissants rose. You can clearly see this in both the raw and cooked photos above. I would also add that the flavor added was not significant enough to make further testing really worth it.
Exploratory Kitchen 