Kouign-Amman is rich, buttery pastry, is properly pronounced “Queen Ah Mahn” and means “butter cake”.
And you know anything called a butter cake is gonna be good.
Ingredients
Ingredients
- 1 cup room temperature water
- 1 ¼ cup + 1 t sugar, separated
- 2 ¼ t (one packet) instant yeast
- Pinch of salt
- 2 cups flour (most – but not all – recipes call for bread flour but I didn’t have any and didn’t want to buy some for one recipe, so I used all-purpose flour and I am very happy with the results)
- 3 T butter, brought to room temperature
- 1 cup butter, cold
- 2 T butter, melted
Directions
Put the water, a teaspoon of the sugar, the yeast and the salt into a large bowl. Stir together then let it sit for 5-10 minutes, until it gets foamy.
Add the flour and the 3 T room temperature butter and knead together until the dough is smooth and lightly sticky.
Get a separate bowl and spray it or brush it with oil or melted butter and add the dough ball to it. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it rise somewhere warm for an hour.
When the dough has doubled in size, roll it into a rectangle, approximately 16” x 12”.
Get ½ cup of your cold butter and either slice it into cubes or grate it over the dough, working quickly while the butter is cold. Sprinkle 1/3 cup of the sugar evenly over the top and fold the dough in thirds, from the short end (pretend you’re folding a letter).
Cover the dough with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for an hour.
After an hour, take it out and roll it back to about 16” x 12” and repeat what you just did before – grate butter, sprinkle 1/3 cup sugar, fold in thirds, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for another hour.
When the hour is almost up, heat the oven to 400 and grab a muffin tin. Spray it or butter and sugar it.
Get your dough and once again roll it out to about 16” x 12”.
Sprinkle another 1/3 cup sugar over the top and cut the dough into 8 strips, along the long side, like this:
Finally roll a strip into a spiral and put it into one of the muffin cups. Repeat this until you’ve done it for all 8 strips.
Get your 2 tablespoons of melted butter and brush the tops of the spirals. Follow that by sprinkling the remaining ¼ cup sugar over the tops. Be careful! Make sure all the sugar gets in/on the dough. I had some spill over and it made the kitchen VERY smoky, triggering the fire alarm, which resulted in a call from ADT asking if they need to send the fire department…all in all not too fun.
Aaaaanyway, bake for about a half hour or until the tops are nicely caramelized and the dough is a nice golden brown.
Remove from the oven and move the whole muffin tin to a wire rack. Let the pastries cool in the tin for about 5 minutes, then remove them from the muffin tin and let them continue to cool on the wire rack.
Makes 8 Kouign-Amann desserts! Or, you know, breakfasts….
Ugly Desserts 