Making my own kouign amann has been on my baking bucket list for years now. Last week I finally had the time and energy to make it happen. And it only took 17 hours to make six of them!
Kouign amann are considered some of the most difficult of the French “viennoiserie” pastries — harder even than traditional croissants. Claire Saffitz lists them as both the highest difficulty and most time consuming of all the recipes in her cookbook Dessert Person. If Saffitz says they are hard, believe her.
Nevertheless, I wanted to at least make an attempt at them, after being obsessed with eating kouign amann for the last ten years. So I spent several hours laboring over these beautiful jewels of pastry, and I lived to tell the tale.
Making the dough was not that tough, although I am glad that I tested my instant yeast to make sure it was still alive (it wasn’t.) Then I just had to wait for it to proof.
Making the butter block was a little daunting, but I’ve done this a few times now, so I have an idea of what I’m going for. I was making a half-recipe, so getting the proportions right was challenging. Math was never my strong suit.
Then came the important step of enclosing the butter block in the proofed dough. I think I got my proportions about right, and managed to make a decent square of dough with a layer of butter in the middle.
Then it was on to the time-consuming and a nerve-wracking process of folding the dough to create those beautiful layers of dough and butter — the “lamination” of the dough. There are four letter folds in total, with time to rest in between to make sure the butter doesn’t melt. The last two folds incorporate sugar into the layering, so the kouign amann has that sugary hit throughout the pastry. I think I managed to not totally bungle this important step.
And then on to the most critical stage: rolling out of the dough one final time into a large rectangle, cutting that rectangle into 3×3 inch squares, and folding those squares into smaller squares to go into the prepared muffin tins. I got nervous doing this final roll, as the dough was quite delicate with 243 layers I was trying to hold together. I balked at getting it to the 9×12 dimensions I was going for, for fear that it would tear. Instead only got six kouign amann shaped and put into the muffin tin.
But they looked pretty legit, so I was encouraged that the whole thing might not be a bust.
I gave them one final proof overnight in the fridge for 10 hours to bake fresh in the morning. (A professional baker friend says that the cold fermentation method is what they do at B. Patisserie.)
The next morning, I jumped out of bed and popped them into a 350º oven for about 30 minutes, and this was the result.
A little bigger than the kouign amann you get at B. Patisserie or Jane the Bakery, but still looking really nice!
I waited an excruciating five minutes for them to cool for a bit before unmolding them from the pan. There was some alarming stickage from the sugar that turned to caramel in the bottom of the tin. The strips of parchment paper that were supposed to help with unmolding tore immediately, unfortunately. But eventually I wrestled them all successfully onto a plate.
Check out this beautiful jewel of pastry!
The lamination was intact, although not as defined as you see from a professionally made one.
But the taste — wow. Beautifully crispy on the outside, buttery and sweet throughout. Just perfect.
Honestly, I’m pretty proud of myself for this. I never would have imagined ten years ago that I could achieve something so complicated and delicate and time-consuming.
Congratulations! They’re beautiful.