There are occasions, though, when I'm on my own for breakfast. Weekends when the boyfriend is away, or midweek days off work in the August lull. On these days, I have an entirely different ritual: the croissant and the coffee.
Ideally, this is a summer ritual. To my mind, one of the most calming things in the world is to sit in the morning sunshine, listening to birds and the movement of air and the world starting to shift, with a good croissant and a good coffee in hand.
The coffee part is fairly simple, although it's taken years for me to find my perfect coffee (currently, the Kenyan AA from Cardew's in the Oxford Covered Market, but I'm open to persuasion). It's ground only as and when I need it, in a Krups burr grinder, set to a slightly finer setting than you should use for a cafetiere. I like sludge at the bottom of my coffee. I then pop a heaped dessertspoonful into a small cafetiere, add water about 5 seconds off the boil, and leave for 3 minutes. It then gets decanted, into a large thick Denby mug, with a generous glug of cold milk.
The croissant is harder. Maison Blanc are the best I've found so far. But I've been reading Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery lately, and discovered that croissants are a form of enriched yeast dough puff pastry (I thought they were just puff pastry). And a friend gave me some sourdough starter a couple of months ago. So far, I'd only made bread: but what if I could make my own croissants?
Luckily, I wasn't the first person to have thought of this, although it seemed that most people added either extra yeast, or a chemical raising agent (baking powder/bicarbonate of soda). I did find one pure recipe, though, courtesy of someone called LeadDog at an American sourdough collaborative blog. This is essentially their recipe, with some timing edits and more details on the folding stage.
The easiest way to get your own starter is to ask a friend for some of theirs. If that fails, then you can make your own, but I'm not the person to advise you on that!
Sourdough croissants
For the initial dough:
140g ripe starter (i.e. starter which has been fed recently and is bubbling actively)
280g milk
60g butter (salted/unsalted/whatever's in the fridge)
15g sugar
480g strong white flour
10g salt
Later:
250g unsalted butter
1 egg
Bring the milk to a boil then leave to cool back down to body temperature. When you can dip your finger in, and can't feel the liquid around it, then it's ok. Bring the butter up to room temperature.
Weigh the starter out into a large mixing bowl, then stir in the milk, followed by the butter and sugar. Mix in the flour - at this stage it will be a sticky mess - and then the salt.
Tip the mixture onto a well-floured worktop, and knead for 5 minutes or so. You want a mixture that is holding together well, and which looks smooth even when stretched. Tip this back into the mixing bowl and leave at room temperature overnight, or for around 10 hours. For me, room temperature is about 20 degrees celcius at the moment.
The next morning, take the 250g pack of butter out of the fridge and leave for a couple of hours. Roll it out between two sheets of greaseproof paper until it's about a centimetre thick, then pop it back in the fridge or freezer to harden - this should take around 30 minutes.
Tip the dough onto a well-floured worktop again, and knead very briefly. Roll out to just over twice the size of the sheet of butter - i.e. if you have a square that's 6 inches x 6 inches of butter, you'll need a rectangle of dough around 13 inches by 7 inches. The aim here is to place the butter on half of the rectangle of dough, then fold the remaining half over, sealing in the butter. I hope that makes sense.
Once your butter is safely sealed, gently roll the entire package out until it's about 12 inches x 18 inches. No need to be precise. Then fold the top third of the dough over the middle third, then fold the bottom third over both of these. You're aiming for something like a letter-folding process. The roll the dough out again, and repeat, but this time aim to have the folds at 90 degree to the previous ones, so your layers are going in a different direction. Then pop the parcel back into the fridge for around an hour, to cool the butter and relax the dough. Make a cup of tea and read a couple of chapters of your book.
You can repeat this as many times as you like, until you get bored. I did three pairs of rolling and folds in total, and got fairly good thin laters; I'd definitely consider doing a fourth in future.
Finally, roll the dough out and cut into triangles. You'll need to decide at this point how large you want your croissants. If you want them big (weekend sized), then you're aiming to make eight. For small, weekday, croissants, you're aiming to get twelve. I found the easiest way of doing this was to roll the dough out to as large as my rolling pin permits (around the 12 x 18 inches mentioned earlier, coincidentally), cut it into two or three rectangles, then roll each of these rectangles out again into a square of roughly 12 x 12 inches. Each square can then be cut into four triangles.
I then rolled each triangle out a little more, stretching the tip opposite the longest side. Those of you who enjoyed Pythagorus at school will be having a great time right now. Start rolling up the longest side, up to the tip, then curl the two points round to make a crescent.
Leave the rolled croissants to rise at room temperature for around 4 hours. Heat the oven to 220 degrees celcius.
Mash the egg up, and brush it over the croissants. Mine didn't look very risen at this point, so don't panic. Pop them in the oven for 20-25 minutes and you get these monstrosities:
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