A yeasted dough laminated with butter three times, cut into triangles, filled with mortadella and curd cheese and rolled. Makes ten, and most of the time is waiting rather than working.
The rise was missing
This recipe took the dough from shaping straight to the oven, and it should not have.
There are twenty-five grams of fresh yeast in it. Yeast works by producing gas inside the dough, and that gas needs time and warmth to inflate the structure the lamination built. Without it the croissants go into the oven at the size they were rolled and come out roughly the same size, dense and heavy.
The rise goes after the egg wash and before the oven: an hour and a half somewhere warm, covered with a cloth, until they have visibly grown and feel light when you press one. It is now step twelve.
The hour in the fridge is not a rise
This is the confusion the original recipe fell into, and it is worth being clear about.
Step three refrigerates the dough for an hour. That is a chill, and its purpose is entirely mechanical: cold dough and cold butter roll into distinct layers, while warm dough absorbs the butter and you end up with a brioche.
Yeast barely works at fridge temperature. So the hour buys you laminable dough and almost no lift, which is why a separate rise at the end is not optional.
Keeping the butter cold
The lamination is three folds, and the enemy throughout is warmth.
If the butter starts showing through the dough or leaking from the edges, stop, put everything back in the fridge for fifteen minutes, and carry on where you left off. Nothing is lost by pausing and a great deal is lost by pushing through.
A cool work surface helps. So does working quickly and not rolling the same spot over and over.
What these actually are
A croissant filled with mortadella and curd cheese is not what a French bakery would hand you, and it is not trying to be.
This is the Latin American filled croissant, the same idea as a Venezuelan cachito: a laminated dough wrapped around ham or mortadella and cheese, eaten at breakfast with coffee. It is bakery food across Colombia and it turns up in every panadería.
Five hundred grams of curd cheese sounds like a lot for ten, and it is generous by design.
More baking
- Homemade bread — without the lamination.
- Colombian carrot cake — no yeast at all.
- Colombian coffee — what goes with them.
- Chocolate chip cookies — the other bakery thing.
Croissant FAQ
Almost certainly because they went into the oven without rising. This recipe used to go straight from shaping to baking, and a yeasted dough that has not been allowed to rise bakes into a bread roll however well it was laminated.
About an hour and a half somewhere warm, covered with a cloth, until they have visibly grown and feel airy rather than dense when you touch one.
No, it is a chill. Cold firms the butter so it can be rolled into layers instead of melting into the dough. It does very little for the yeast at that temperature.
Around three and a quarter hours, of which perhaps forty-five minutes is work. The card used to say forty-five minutes total, which did not even cover the hour in the fridge.
Put the whole thing back in the fridge for fifteen minutes and carry on. Butter that melts into the dough gives one thick layer instead of many thin ones, which is what the lamination is for.
Yes, and then you have plain croissants. The filling is what makes these the Latin American version, the same idea as a cachito.
Yes. Twenty-five grams of fresh yeast is roughly eight grams of instant dried, which goes in with the flour rather than dissolved in water.
📖 Recipe
Ingredients
- 500 g wheat flour
- 250 ml warm water
- 175 g butter (for laminating, softened but still cool)
- 50 g white sugar
- 25 g fresh yeast (or 8 g of dried)
- 1 packet of mortadella
- 500 g curd cheese (cuajada)
- 10 g salt
- 1 beaten egg (for glazing)
Notas
Instructions
- Stir the flour with the salt and the sugar. Make a well in the middle, pour in the warm water and knead well.
- Add the yeast with another 2 tablespoons of warm water and keep kneading until everything is worked in.
- Stretch the dough into a rectangle, put it on a tray, cover it with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour. This is a chill, not a rise: cold dough is what makes the butter possible to laminate.
- Soften the butter and flatten it with a rolling pin into a sheet.
- Take the dough out, put it on a floured surface and roll it out.
- Cut it into a rectangle and lay the sheet of butter on top.
- Fold the dough over the butter and roll it out again. Repeat this three times, chilling it briefly if the butter starts to come through, until you have layers like puff pastry.
- Roll the dough out and cut it into triangles.
- Lay two sheets of mortadella and some thin pieces of cheese on each triangle.
- Roll each one up starting from the wide end.
- Brush them with the beaten egg.
- Leave them on the tray in a warm place, covered with a cloth, until they have visibly risen and feel airy when you touch them. This takes about an hour and a half and it is the step that decides whether you get a croissant or a bread roll.
- Bake at 200°C (390°F) for 15 minutes.
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