This week was different. On Monday night I had a "spare" 30 minutes before putting Emery to bed and decided that the little dude and I could whip up a small batch of croissant dough to test out the red wheat flour that vexed me in batch two. The version of this email that I drafted in the back of my head while rolling the dough into a block, had two bakes. The throw away testing bake I was making at the time and a real bake I'd make later in the week. But then I got the flu, and what was supposed to be my throw away bake turned into the only bake. And wow, does it show.

Below is the dried out dough (I used dough on Saturday I made on Monday) as I wrapped it around whipped honey butter.

I'm starting to write this week's newsletter while the croissants are still unfinished. Somehow the week got away from me and so the 24hour+ process of making croissants did not start mid-afternoon yesterday! Fear not, they will be done in time for me to include Caitlin's expert review.

As I wait for the dough to rest between the second and third turn I thought I'd take sometime to talk about my plans for baking this week and what comes next for this newsletter, but first, an excerpt from a conversation between Emery and Caitlin while I worked on the first turn.

It's 11:38 on Tuesday night and I am writing this with buttery flakes all over my fingers and shirt. What a wonderful life! Being late, I'm eating them alone. Let's pretend I only going to eat this one.

It's after the kids have been put to bed. In a few hours this email needs to be sent and I'm just getting started now. I blame a trip to the library and this excellent book. Ironically, I didn't procrastinate on making the croissants at all. They were done before west coast readers were even out of bed on Monday morning.

In order to have fresh made croissants on Monday, I had to make the croissants on Sunday afternoon and evening. As a father of a 3 year old, this means baking with a toddler. A toddler who was convinced more than once that the pointy side the rolling pin was a better tool for gently working with laminated dough... I'm happy to say his moments of insolence had little negative impact on the batch and that this one is the best yet! Not that there aren't problems to solve.

Expert rating: 5 out of 10
Expert review: Still not quite there on the saltiness, butteriness, and flakiness but it was assuredly a croissant.

While my last email pointed out the failures of the first batch, I was feeling pretty good about my innate skill to make croissants. People liked them. They mostly looked like croissants. I assumed I knew what to improve in the second batch. But those technical improvements were not enough, I also needed MORE croissants. And, I needed to try a new butter because I felt like I was skipping out on the key ingredient. And then, when I realized I could get local flour, I just had to use it. If I had stepped back and counted the changes I was making, I'd like to think I would have stopped, but it wasn't until I had fully worked the dry flour into the wet ingredients and the ball was still very wet that I realized how far from the original recipe I had diverged. Pride comes before the fall, and the enthusiasm blinds us all.

Expert rating: 3 out of 10
Expert review: "They tasted like...bread? Not super buttery, not enough salt and not a lot of air. Grateful for fresh bakes anyways. :)"

The expert above is Caitlin, my wife. In reviewing this post, she suggested that a ranking system would make how the batch went clearer, and so I asked her to be the judge and throw in a short review as well. As you can see, there wasn't much room for praise. Below I'll cover more about what went wrong, but the main culprits are using a new flour, trying to scale the recipe too far and letting proof go on for too long. Next batch I'll be going back to the flour from batch 1, doubling the recipe rather than tripling it. This week also was plagued by a five hour proof as I needed to sleep. Lets hope that can be avoided in batch 3.

Somehow, in the process of planning for this first batch of croissants, I came to the conclusion that the right time to eat homemade croissants was in those precious moments spent waiting for my first cup of coffee to cool to its ideal temperature. And, since clearly one needs to eat a croissant while the smell of it baking is still in the air, I found myself waking up at 3:45am on Thursday morning to roll out, cut, shape and set my first batch of croissants to proof so that I could have them in the oven by 6:30 and out by 7. The work paid off, even if they were much more like crescent rolls than croissants. Crescent rolls are a consolation prize, it turns out. Though, next week, I really hope I pull out croissants! Below is how I came to make these wonderful little failures. But first, context!

Last year I read a newsletter by the author Robin Sloan. It was about nothing really. His thoughts and discoveries correlated each week and sent out to people who wanted to follow along. But now he's stopped writing it. The project is over. The goal complete. He wrote 48 nearly weekly newsletters and moved on. I like this idea. I'd like to write something and then move on. Though I'm not sure I could last a year. My life works more in quarters than in years. So, let's assume this lasts the first quarter or 2020, 13 Sundays. This is Sunday number one.