I recently took a 2-day course in viennoiserie at the San Francisco Baking Institute (yes, the same place I took the pie class). I’ve also taken 2 bread courses there, but I haven’t had a chance to blog about those. This course was taught by the same woman as the pie class and it was just as good.
My first set above was a bit wonky (albeit still delicious), but they got better as we went through the course.
See how much better those guys look? Those are from the second day and my technique for rolling croissants significantly improved.
The class was very hands on. A fair bit of the time was spent learning the lamination which is creating exponential layers of butter between layers of dough. We did that at least twice and it was very helpful the second day after we saw how wonky our croissants came out. We could apply the critiques that our instructor gave us.
We also used the laminated dough to create danishes. These were sooo good and I can’t wait to make more although croissants are simpler since you don’t need to also make the fillings, so I’m focusing on those first to get the details of the dough down.
We learned a number of different types of shapes for danishes. My favorites are probably the star (upper left) and the basic (upper right). However, I really do like the twists (lower right) for using up extra dough.
And apparently brioche is part of viennoiserie. I didn’t realize this before signing up, but am pretty happy to have learned this.
The brioche was absolutely delicious and I will definitely be stepping it up for the dinner rolls at Thanksgiving this year.
Ended up with a ton of pastries that I deposited at friends’ houses, my house and brought to my pottery class. It was well received everywhere! Plus these pastries are so fun to photograph with my pottery (I made both the plate and cup below). They inspire me to create more tiny plates to eat pastries like this brioche tart on!
And I definitely enjoyed some myself! I’ve already done one practice set and have a few details to work out. I have a tiny fridge which definitely makes things a bit more challenging when chilling the dough, but I’m working it out. It’s going to be a tough call on what I bring to my next potluck — bread, pies, croissants or macarons. I doubt I can go wrong.
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