Petit Kouign Amann

These mini kouign amann are made from croissant dough. It's a challenge, and it might take a couple of days to make, but you can do it. And it freezes nicely for later use.

Laminated Pastry Dough

A great recipe, roughly based on the famous Tartine croissant dough recipe. It's a lengthy process, but well worth the investment. This batch should make about 12 pastries. You can freeze leftover dough, but you might wanna halve the recipe.

Combine salt and sugar. Mix well. It's important to get a good mix here or you'll end up with salty spots in your pastries. I put the blend in my mini Cuisinart. I used turbinado sugar here but I think granulated would have worked better.

Trim the edges of the rectangle

Once you've got your laminated dough ready, make sure it's defrosted, and roll it out to a large rectangle. The rectangle should be about 10" wide. The dough should be about 1/2" thick.

Cut the dough into squares. The squares should be around 4 1/2" wide.

Sprinkle a good layer of your salted sugar onto each square of dough. Pass a rolling pin over the top just to get the sugar to stick to the dough firmly.

Grease a muffin pan thoroughly with butter. Dust with the salted sugar.

To form the kouign amann, pinch opposite corners and fold towards each other simultaneously. Press the folded dough into the tray.

Cover with plastic wrap and let them sit in a warm spot for about an hour.

Bake

Set the tray on a parchment-lined baking sheet. These will leak a ton of butter as they cook, and you definitely don't want butter dripping in your oven. Reduce the oven temperature to 350ºF and bake for 20 minutes.

Rotate

Turn the tray in the oven and bake until golden brown on top, another 10-20 minutes.

Flip them out onto a baking rack to cool. Make sure you've got some kind of tray under them because they should continue to drip butter. Cool for about 30 minutes. Serve fresh for best results.