Kouign-amann: The Best Dessert You've Never Heard Of |
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| Written by Brendan Blom |
| Sunday, 30 March 2008 19:00 |
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Kouign-amann is the platonic ideal of a dessert pastry. Mostly butter and sugar, it usually comes in the size and shape of a pie. Its top is a deep golden-brown, shiny coating of caramelized sugar; biting through this chewy crust reveals thin, light, flaky, buttery inner layers. It is sweet but not sickeningly so, and so good that you could easily eat two or three pieces in one session. It originates from the butter-rich region of Brittany in northern France, and its name is Breton dialect for "butter cake". I had my first taste of kouign-amann when I recently spent a weekend with some friends in Montreal. We were walking around looking for a place to eat brunch on Saturday morning, and I noticed a bakery advertising kouign-amann and a few other weirdly spelled products. The window was fogged up so I couldn't see inside, but I could smell something fantastic -- the usual bakery sweetness, but with an added super-charge of butter. I called to my friends -- loudly, we were all stone deaf from the Black Mountain concert the night before -- to come back and check out what was going on there. We each bought a piece and had one of those great moments of collective revelation. I first read of kouign-amann over a year ago, on a posting by one of the best culinary bloggers around, David Lebovitz -- a former pastry chef at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse, now living it up in Paris. Lebovitz provided a recipe for kouign-amann, but at the time I read it, it looked much too complicated and time-consuming for me to try. I'm not much of a baker, and have been known to screw up simple things like muffins and pizza dough. Ultimately, I figured that since it was such an obscure dish, I would have to wait until the next time I was in France to try it. But this bakery in Montreal proved me wrong; kouign-amann is only a couple of hours away from Ottawa. (I saw at least one other bakery offering it as well.) And, after having tried a piece, I decided this would definitely be worth a regular two-hour trip. Better yet, though, if I learned how to make it, I could stuff myself around the clock and never worry about having to spend three hours on the road every weekend. I printed off Lebovitz's recipe the day after I got home, and read it over several times before the following weekend, when I would make the Big Attempt. On closer reading, it still looked like a time-consuming project, but not so terribly complicated. There were several sessions of letting the dough sit in the fridge for an hour in between brief periods of rolling it out. And Lebovitz provided lots of pictures and helpful little tips and things to watch out for; so I figured I couldn't go too far wrong. (Here is a link to his recipe.) On my first attempt, I managed to get almost through to the end of the 
Illustration by Nina Charest
I continued the next morning, rolling out the dough again, adding a ton of sugar and folding and rolling it all in, then covering the top with more sugar; then spreading the dough to cover the base of a pie tin, and sticking it in the oven for 40 minutes. The problem started when I opened the oven again. The sugar had all liquified and run off the side of the pastry to the edges of the pie tin, and burned into an oily, black, bubbling, foul-smelling mess that looked like a lab sample from the LaBrea tar pits. I let the whole thing cool for ten minutes -- maybe that would help turn this tar back into sugar! Did I mention I'm not a very experienced baker? -- I came back to find the sugar had mostly solidified into a shiny black shell. Finally, after taking the whole thing out of the pan and letting it cool on a rack for another ten minutes, the black sugar had oozed glacially down towards the countertop a few centimetres and solidified even more, firmly attaching the kouign-amann to the rack. I had to pull as hard as I could to break off the globs of black sugar and free the pastry. Then I took a butter knife and used it as a chisel to chip off the rest of the black crust around the rim. Sharp, diamond-hard black splinters shot into every corner of the kitchen. The middle tasted OK, though it was not as thin and flaky as the stuff in Montreal. But definitely good enough that I stood in the kitchen nibbling at it until I had to go and lie down, leaving the shards of sugar all around the kitchen. I ended up eating most of it myself, and felt like I had a rock in my stomach for the rest of the day; but a very sugary, buttery rock. Undaunted, I tried again the next day for a greater success, one that I could brag about and show off to my friends. This time, I looked up the recipe in my fancy new Larousse Gastronomique. But I hit a snag immediately upon starting. The recipe said to measure out the yeast in grams or milliliters; but the packaging on the yeast I bought had statistics only in teaspoons and ounces. If there's one thing I hate, it's recipes that make me do research and math at 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning. The recipe then said to add warm water to the yeast, mix in a quarter of a cup of flour, and then put it in a warm place until doubled in volume. All of which I did, and then left it on a warm spot on the stove. An hour later, it sat there, neither larger nor smaller, just a useless lump of slightly moist flour; so I cursed for 30 seconds at the waste of time and ingredients, threw the whole sorry mess in the garbage and enjoyed the rest of my Sunday. This experience made me recall a quotation from one of Julian Barnes' essays for his collection, The Pedant in the Kitchen: "Perhaps, as well as cooking time and number of portions, recipes should also carry a Depression Probability rating. From one to five stars -- no, better, hangman's nooses." This kouign-amann was turning into at least a four on the suicide scale. My self esteem at low ebb, I decided I needed to make one final effort to vanquish the enemy; and this time, I'd call in the armoured cavalry: my friend April, an accomplished baker (not to mention regular (Cult)ure contributor and writer of an excellent blog). She came over the following Saturday, having consulted half a dozen different recipes online, and selected her favourite. She'd found one that included a traditional Breton quotation, stating, "Make kouign-amann if you want, successfully make it if you can." She took charge, and I was (willingly) relegated to sous-chef, measuring out ingredients, dusting surfaces with liberal handfuls of flour. We filled the time between rolling sessions by playing Scrabble on an increasingly flour-covered board. I got nervous about the success of our operation about halfway through, as April was rolling out the dough and the butter kept seeping out the sides of the dough "envelope". Butter was getting all over the kitchen, and the flour was making it hard to breathe -- the air in the kitchen was starting to look as thick as Baghdad during a windstorm -- and I was about to unleash a Gordon Ramsay-esque tantrum, when somehow April pulled everything together and it came out fine. I have to say, April did most of the work -- it looked to me like she just rolled for about 45 minutes -- but I feel pretty confident that if I tried on my own now, I could manage OK. We made smaller pastries than normal -- about four inches in diameter, instead of nine -- and baked them only about 25 minutes, instead of 45. And they came out brilliantly. I had three pieces for myself, and the reviews from various other friends were unanimously positive. Here's the champion recipe.
© 2008 Brendan Blom, Illustration by Nina Charest; licensee (Cult)ure Magazine.
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