[rat]

Hi everyone,
While rolling croissant and danish today I was wondering if there was an ideal number of layers in a croissant or puff pastry. Usually I do a single fold and 3 book folds giving me 128 layers. I experimented in the past with less layers and more and found this number gives me the best oven spring and good flakiness. This seems to be lately my magic number with our puff pastry, danish and croissant. Do you all have any preferences as to the number of layers you make? On a side note I was showing one of the kids how to make puff dough and we did 2 single folds and 4 book folds to yield 1024 layers a true mille feu, incidentally it was not that good, very crumbly with a minimal amount of oven spring.

[foodpump]

Never did do much Danish, but I do a fair amount of puff. For me, I like to do 2 doubles, a single, then rest overnight and then one more double. Also the thickness of the dough being rolled out is importnat for me, I never like to go thinner than 10 mm.

[Blueicus]

Rat, I certainly agree with you that when it comes to laminate yeast doughs that there is certainly a declining returns concept going on when determining how many holds to do. I've done and have been taught to do a few three-folds ending with a four, which yields theoretically between 100 and 200 layers... when you try to do more I find that the dough will start to tear a lot and that after rising you won't really notice the difference anyways because the yeast dough layers aren't particularly separated anyways (unlike a puff pastry dough that doesn't rely on yeast to leaven). Since in a bread you're still primarily using the yeast to puff it up (the butter is used more to create distinct layers) you will want substantial yeast pockets to make it rise nicely and be fluffy (yet flaky) on the inside.