Amy has been wanting to bake Kuign Amann for a couple of years, and I finally girded my loins and suggested we do it this weekend. I was daunted by the idea of making puff pastry. But the dough was super easy, and I mixed that last night, let it rise an hour in the house, then set it in the mudroom overnight to chill. It rose beautifully:
In my morning/her afternoon, we commenced the hard part. First we pounded eight ounces of cold butter. Mine came in two ounce blocks so I pounded each separately, then stacked them to pound the whole mass into a ‘rectangle’ roughly 6″x10″, which then went in the fridge; and in came the dough from the cold mudroom.
This got rolled to 12″x20″ and the chilled butter laid in the center. Then the folding began:
There followed several repetitions of rolling, folding, turning, and chilling, anticipation of which was part of what had daunted me. But my dough behaved so beautifully that it was a joy: I felt exhilarated each time the dough rolled out to the proper size with no butter ever escaping. After the first four fold&rolls, it was time to dump sugar over the whole thing:
… and then another fold and roll and more sugar. I was grateful to have a little self-propelled vacuum/mop underfoot the whole day.
We went off and on zoom several times, each ate lunch at an appropriate break, and came back for the final roll, cut, shape, and bake.
I was positively ecstatic to see gorgeous layers as I stuffed the pastries into the muffin tin. Doing something new, challenging, fun, and meaningful was the perfect antidote to the somber start of my day. Not only is there difficult personal suffering going on for several friends for which I’m feeling great compassion, but I listened to the very sane voice of R. Hubbell first in his morning newsletter and then in a weekly livestream. He discussed the insidiously unfolding coup that is gathering steam as the regime initiates full-on purges of government employees, deploys censorship and blackouts that will hamstring dozens of public agencies on which citizens’ health and security depend, and launches all-out attacks on LGBTQ+ Americans. For starters.
We didn’t talk much about the coup. It’s hard to face the truth of it. I’m grateful there are people who get paid to make sense of what’s happening in the government. But even I can see with the evidence of my own eyes and ears that this isn’t “politics as usual,” this is an attempt by a few white male billionaires and their minions to force the country into their vision of a totalitarian white male so-called Christian dystopia. Hubbell is very confident that they won’t succeed, because Americans won’t stand for it once they realize what the real-time effects are on their real lives; and I agree with him. Instead, we talked about pastry, family, friends, mindfulness, values, integrity, and making meaningful choices in even the simplest situations in this one precious day that will never come again.
We agreed that making Kuign Amann wasn’t all that hard after all, it just took time. The making was easy and fun: the baking was another story for me. Hers turned out perfectly. More than six thousand feet higher than her oven, my oven didn’t turn out the best pastries. I could hear Paul Hollywood’s voice in my head saying as he turned one over, “You’ve lost the layers, aven’t you?” and Prue saying “It’s a bit stodgy,” and then both of them muttering “Soggy bottom…” Next time, I’ll use a little less butter, a lot less sugar, and bake at a higher temperature. Or maybe I’ll research “high altitude puff pastry adaptations.” I did use 25 percent less yeast in the dough, but didn’t look beyond that. Having learned from experience and accepted the result, next time I’ll do the right thing. We can all do that: learn from experience, accept the situation, and then do the next right thing.
