I've been making these for a few years after going on a hunt for a mystery pastry that I ate at a French cafe a million years ago. These are delightfully both sweet and savory with hints of a salted caramel. Buttery, crunchy with that layered bready goodness. They are from a video from Chef John, but he just talks you through it and doesn't have the recipe transcribed, so I did my best.
Ingredients for 12 Kouign-Amann:
For the dough:
1 cup warm water
1 teaspoon dry active yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon melted unsalted butter
2 1/2 cups bread flour, plus more as needed
1 teaspoon kosher salt
For the seasoned sugar (mix, taste, and adjust):
2/3 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons of sea salt or kosher salt (less if you’re using a fine table salt)
For the rest:
8 ounces ice cold unsalted butter (2 sticks) for the pastry
1 tablespoon melted butter for the muffin pan
Put water, sugar and yeast in a bowl to proof for about 10 minutes. Once you're sure it's alive, then add a little bit of melted butter and most but not all of our flour and a pinch of salt. Then it makes a very sticky dough. Put the last ½ cup of flour of on your work surface and then fold and kneed your dough together until it feels right. Soft, slightly sticky, elastic dough. Then transfer to a buttered bowl and cover, let rising to double in size, about an hour and a half.
Make seasoned sugar. Set aside.
Prep muffin pan by coating with melted butter. Then coat the muffin pan with your seasoned sugar. Then knock out extra sugar into your bowl for later.
Transfer dough onto a floured surface and press it out into a rectangle shape. Then, using your rolling pan, roll it out to a ¼” to 1/8” thickness, making a large rectangle. Pulling on your corners as needed.
Then taking a very cold, even frozen stick of unsalted butter, grate that over the dough. Try, if possible, to leave an inch unbuttered around the edges. Then, after flouring your hands, gently, but firmly press that butter into the dough. Then fold the dough into thirds like a letter. Square up the edges the best you can.
Next, place on a parchment lined, flour sheet pan and cover in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Take it out of the fridge and place on your lightly floured surface and roll again to your large rectangle shape to that ¼ to 1/8 inch thickness and repeat the butter fold step again.
Instead of chilling it again, at this point, we'll roll it back out to a rectangle and dust it with flour, folding it into thirds again. (Not adding any more butter now. ;) )
Then roll it back out and give it one more fold into thirds. We're creating a laminated dough if you hadn't figured that out.
Transfer back to your lightly floured parchment lined baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap and chill in your fridge for at least an hour.
Sprinkle a bunch of your seasoned sugar onto your work surface and then place your dough on top of that. Then more of that seasoned sugar onto the top of the dough before you roll it out. Keep adding sugar to both sides periodically as you are rolling out the dough.
Try to do this last rolling out quickly because the sugar and salt will start to pull moisture out of the dough.
You will continue to roll it out, adding your seasoned sugar, until you get a rectangle of about ¼ to 1/8 of an inch thick.
Using a pizza cutter, trim your edges to make that perfect rectangle. You will then cut that into 12 squares; so 3x4. Sprinkle again with the seasoned sugar mix. Then transfer to the pan.
Shape so that all four corners meet in the middle and press center into pan. Once they are all panned, then top with a little more sugar.
Let sit for 10 minutes before baking to give a little tiny proof.
Transfer to the center rack of a 375 degree oven for 25-30 minutes until beautifully golden brown and puffed.
Very important: remove them from the pan to a cooling rack while they are still hot, or you won't be able to get them out. Cool at least 15 minutes before diving in.
