Kouign Amann Post Mortem: crackers and other uses for this dough!

As usual, one thing leads to another in the kitchen. I was not entirely comfortable publishing a Kouign Amann recipe because I live a sugar-free life and those delicious pastries contain a fair bit of the white stuff. I even tried laminating the dough with honey to see if it might make a good sugar substitute (it almost always does). But working with soft butter and runny honey made the lamination process very messy. The honey-filled pastry also didn’t turn out as flaky as it should. It had a cakey texture, which I suspect has to do with the hygroscopic quality honey has. So I decided to leave the sugar out of the recipe entirely to find out what a savory version of this pastry looked like. I figured the result should be a reasonable stand-in for puff pastry.

A few days ago, finding myself with a bag of Kenji Lopez-Alt’s excellent Neapolitan pizza dough fermenting in the refrigerator, I gave it a go. Using 100 grams of dough I followed the recipe for Kouign Amann in my last post, sans sucre. It worked like a charm, puffing up beautifully in the oven. I rolled out the leftover scraps very thin and sprinkled them with seeds and salt. Those crackers were so deadly I asked my husband to hide them somewhere. (He ate them.)

So if you are like me and don’t like the idea of a sugar-laced pastry,  just leave it out and enjoy some of these savory preparations. The possibilities are actually pretty endless for this pastry. Neopolitans? Bouchées à la reine? Pain au chocolat? Palmiers? Turnovers? Apple dumplings? Croissants? Pourquoi pas? 

- See more at: http://www.susanmckennagrant.com/2017/01/17/kouign-amann-followup-an-easy-puff-pastry-dupe-and-crackers-too/#sthash.4i3z39ip.dpuf