Pastry lab

Pick the pastry — croissant, pain au chocolat, Danish, classic puff, rough (blitz) puff or inverted puff — and how much: a number of pieces and their shaped weight (with an allowance for trim), or for puff a total weight. You get the détrempe (the dough) and the butter block in grams, from typical formulas in baker’s percentages.

Lock-in sets how the butter goes in: the French envelope (one butter layer), the English letter lock (two), inverted (the butter-and-flour beurre manié wraps the dough) or none, for rough puff. The tool sizes the butter block for the thickness you choose and the dough to wrap it.

Folds are written as letters: L for a letter (single, 3-fold) and B for a book (double, 4-fold). Each letter fold triples the butter layers and each book fold quadruples them; where the outside dough layers meet they merge, so there is always one more dough layer than butter. The tool draws the cross-section after each fold, gives the size to roll to before each fold, and works out how thin each butter layer ends up in the final sheet — 12 layers in a 4.5 mm croissant sheet are about 0.1 mm each; classic puff’s 729 are under 2 µm.

Cut and shape gives the croissant triangle from the target weight — base and height (2.8 times the base) at your sheet thickness — and the strip to roll it from, drawn; the pain au chocolat rectangle for two batons; Danish squares; or the size a puff sheet rolls to.

Temperatures shows the butter’s working window: bendable like modelling clay at about 12–16 °C, brittle below about 8 °C, smearing into the dough above about 20 °C and melting from about 28 °C — which is why yeasted laminated doughs proof at 24–27 °C and no warmer. The plan lists every step with a typical duration.

Process cards for choux pastry, French, Swiss and Italian meringue, crème pâtissière, crème anglaise, lemon curd and caramel sauce: a starting formula by weight (scale it with Batch size), the steps, and the temperatures that matter — eggs into choux below 60 °C, Swiss meringue to 71 °C (the US egg-safety temperature), the Italian meringue syrup at 118 °C, pastry cream boiled for a full minute or two, crème anglaise to 82–84 °C and never past 85 °C.

The stages from thread to dark caramel, with temperatures, the syrup’s sugar content, the cold-water test and what each stage is for. Give your altitude: water boils lower up a mountain — about 1 °C less for every 300 m, worked out from the standard atmosphere — and every stage moves down with it.

The syrup planner is for Italian meringue and pâte à bombe: for your sugar and water and target it says how much water boils off, when to start whipping the whites (110 °C at sea level, about a minute before the syrup is ready) and roughly how long the syrup takes for the heat your hob puts into the pan. The time is an energy sum, so it is only as good as the wattage you give; watch the thermometer.

Pick dark, milk, white, ruby or compound chocolate and a method — seeding (melt three-quarters, stir in the rest chopped), tabling on marble, or cocoa butter powder (1 %). The chart draws the melt, cool and work temperatures for each chocolate, with the melting point of cocoa butter’s form V crystals, the only form that gives snap and shine. The step timer walks through the method with each step’s target temperature and a typical duration, with a sound and notification when a step’s time is up; move on when the thermometer agrees. Compound (coating) chocolate is not tempered.

Choose shortcrust (pâte brisée), flaky pie dough, pâte sucrée or pâte sablée, and the tin: a tart ring or tin, a pie dish (top and base diameters and depth, single or double crust), tartlets, or a rectangular tart tin. You get the dough weight — the circle you roll out, at your thickness, including what you trim — the ingredients in grams, and blind baking steps to bake the case fully (for fillings that are not baked) or part-bake it (for fillings baked in the case).