Happy new year everyone! I hope you all had a nice holiday.
Just like most people this year I spent a lot of my holiday at home just relaxing. Of course I also did a lot of cooking and especially baking. One thing I had wanted to try for a while was making my own croissants. They require some different skills compared to bread making as you are not just making bread, but pastry. They also require quite a lot of patience and time...and butter.
So much butter actually. I made around 12 or so quite small croissants with some dough scraps leftover and I used 250g of butter! Just for some context, in Japan most packets of butter in the supermarket are 200g. That's right, that's a lot of butter. But it is the butter that gives croissants those delicious flakey layers.
On day one I made my dough which was similar to other doughs I have made before for sweet breads. Meaning there was a bit of sugar, milk, eggs and you guessed it...butter! As I don't own a stand mixer I had to knead this dough for some time, around 15 minutes or so and already I was feeling the required effort to make a croissant. Once it came together though it did smell quite nice and I probably could have made quite a delicious bread with the dough alone. I put it in the fridge for the next day.
The next day, day two, time for butter. I had to roll out my butter into a square shape so I could more easily layer it with my dough. I used a freezer bag to neatly roll it into shape and put it back into the fridge to stop it from melting. Next I had to roll out my dough from the day before.
Luckily it wasn't too sticky, but I don't have much rolling experience and this definitely took me much longer than I expected. I had to roll it into a long rectangle so I could fold in my butter. After I had the shape I wanted (kind of) I placed my square of butter in the middle and wrapped it up like a present in the middle. I sealed the edges and it was time to roll again, this time with the butter inside.
This is where the real difficulty begins...
This process, which is called laminating, was an interesting challenge. You want the butter and the dough to be as even as possible to create even layers. If the butter is too warm then it can melt and fall out or break the dough, if it is too cold it can break into pieces inside your dough making everything more difficult or it coud just break the dough. The gluten in the dough itself will start to fight back after a while and won't roll any further. Time and temperature are crucial.
As this was my first time, it was a bit of a mess and I didn't quite get the desired length of my dough before I had to stop. I folded the dough into three like a letter and placed in back into the fridge to cool. I then had to repeat this process about three times, this is how you create those layers, and luckily it got a little bit easier each time. Roll, fridge, wait, roll, fridge, wait...Once it was done, I left it in the fridge again overnight for the next day.
Day three! It was finally time to bake some croissants.
To get that croissant shape you basically cut a triangle into your dough and then softly roll it up into that lovely shape. One thing you have to do though is measure your triangles, if they are all the same size then they will cook at the same speed and all be equally delcious.
My rolled croissants
Once you have made your croissants, just like regular bread, you have to let them rise. Once they are risen they should have a kind of jelly-like shape, where if you shake the pan the croissants will wobble like jelly. Perhaps because it has been so cold recently, I waited over two hours and my croissants never really got to this jelly stage but they had risen quite a bit. At this point they looked good, but I was a bit worried that nothing would happen in the oven and that something had gone wrong in the long process.
Before putting them in the oven I brushed them with an egg wash. After they had gone in, all I could do was wait. They only bake for about 15 minutes or so, therefore if I had done something wrong I would know it soon. But what happened next is probably the reason that I have become so obsessed with baking. You spend so much time making something, trying not to damage it, making careful movements etc. At no point in this process does it ever look like the actual thing you are making and it is completely inedible. Then after just a little heat in the oven (or a lot in some cases) all of your hard work transforms into something that is delicious (hopefully) and completely different in appearance (always).
In only a few minutes my croissants had risen into croissants! I was so happy and relieved. The smell took over my apartment, I'm sure my neighbours were wondering where the sudden smell of buttery pastry had come from. After about seventeen minutes they were done. About a minute later, my lovely wife and I had already eaten two. And then another... They were delicious. Success!
A great start to my ongoing baking journey this year.
As a foreigner in Japan, I am always comparing things here to the way they are back in the UK. Consciously or unconsciously, this kind of thinking is going on with me all the time. Best bars? UK. Best restaurants? Japan. Best potato chips? UK. Best public transport? Japan. Best bacon? UK. Best weather? Well, aside from the pressure-cooker temperature of Summer, Japan wins that too.
But there’s one thing in Japan that I think is light years ahead of anything we have in the UK, and that is the traditional Japanese inn, the Ryokan. There is absolutely nothing comparable in the UK’s hotel and hospitality industry.
This winter vacation, I and my partner went to a ryokan in Izu, Shizuoka prefecture. Not a big or elaborate place at all, a quite small ryokan by a river, surrounded by mountains. But even this small unremarkable place amazed me. In the eight years I have lived in Japan, I have only visited a Ryokan a handful of times. None of the places I went to were particularly upmarket or expensive, and most of them are quite modest. However, each time I visit one, I am very impressed.
There is something very appealing to me about spending a day or two in a relaxation-induced daze, lounging around in a yukata, sitting in an outside bath for an hour, before relaxing in a beautiful traditional Japanese room with a veranda overlooking a river, and then getting the best kind of Japanese food delivered to a private room – 10, 11, 12 courses! I spend most of my time at these places simply floating.
And there’s usually some beautiful scenery around the place if you want to get out of the hotel and go for a walk – forests, shrines, waterfalls and so on. Ryokans tend to be situated to maximise the effect of the local area.
The service is always second to none, the staff are always incredibly polite and friendly, and the atmosphere is always welcoming. This kind of accommodation should definitely be adopted in foreign countries. If I were to stay in a western hotel for the same price, the experience wouldn’t be anywhere near the same.
So at the top of the list of things I would miss if I for some reason had to leave the country – a list which also includes maguro sashimi, yakiniku, and on-time trains - is the humble Japanese ryokan. I hope to visit many more in the future.
