Baking Bouchon - Recipe 68: Craquelins

It's been over a month since I posted a recipe from the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook.  Yikes!  I guess I needed a break after the aggressive number of croissants I baked.

Craquelins are in the brioche and doughnuts section of the cookbook and fit the bill for a breakfast type bread.

I finally had to go out and buy oranges which I did not have for the Cranberry Orange Bread or Cranberry Orange Scones but I still got to use up more orange liquor.

The orange flavor is imparted in this baked good in 3 ways - orange liqueur, orange zest and candied orange peel are all added to the dough.
The preparation includes a recipe for homemade candied orange peel & pith which is, frankly, a pain in the rear to make.  The ingredients are simple enough... orange, sugar and corn syrup, but the process takes forever.

First you have to hollow out the oranges, getting rid of the actual orange part and leaving just the peel.  This is harder than it sounds and Thomas Keller's recommendation to reserve the oranges for another use is ridiculous.  Getting them out of the peels completely destroys the oranges rendering them useless for any other purpose.

The peels are then boiled in water to tenderize them.  They are then cut into strips and cooked again in a mixture of sugar and corn syrup to candy them.  All of that is not completely terrible, but then you have to take each and every little strip and remove the pith from the peel.  Seriously?  Why couldn't I just peel the orange to begin with leave the pith where it was.  It would have saved me from mangling a perfectly good orange and from spending 30 minutes depithing candied orange peel.

By the way, candied orange peel does not taste like candy.  It tastes like slightly less bitter orange peel... approximately as bitter as I was when I finished making this freakin' orange peel.

After that torture, putting together the brioche dough is a cinch.  You make a little starter with milk, flour and yeast that sits around for an hour to help get the yeast moving.  That all gets added to more flour, sugar, salt and a bunch of eggs.  Then a ton of butter gets incorporated.  Into the finished dough you knead the candied orange peel, orange zest and orange liquor.  All that rises rises a bit, gets folded up and stuck in the refrigerator overnight.

One of the more interesting parts of this pastry is that when you form it into individual pieces, you stick a sugar cube inside of each dough ball.  That all gets brushed with egg wash and rises again before baking.  Right before sticking it in the oven, it gets a topping of pearl sugar.

Thank goodness for the sugar cube in the center and the sugar on top because this dough is definitely not sweet.  The orange doesn't add any sweetness at all, in fact, it's downright bitter so without the added sugar I would have hated this thing.

This thing does have one thing going for it... it IS pretty.

CA said he liked it and insisted I retain a couple of them for him to enjoy over the next few days of which he ate exactly zero.  That is a sign that he was being nice and trying to compensate for my grumpiness over spending hours making candied orange peel only to not love the finished result.  I know all his sweet tricks.

Enjoy!
Julie