Why Technical Butter is Essential for Flawless Viennoiserie
Choosing the right butter for perfect lamination with Chef Daniel Álvarez
Croissants, palmiers, and panettones: just a handful of the dozens of recipes that the Spanish pastry chef Daniel Álvarez has shared with the world. A good butter is, for Álvarez, the basis of each of these recipes. Butter by Debic, of course: this leading pastry chef knows he can trust it under every circumstance.
Pastry chef Daniel Álvarez, the owner of the Dalua pastry shop in the Spanish province of Alicante, member of the prestigious association Relais Desserts and an ambassador for Debic, begins every day with a croissant and a café con leche. If the croissant is not good, he will be annoyed about it all day. If it is perfect, then his day cannot go wrong. Puff pastry and brioches deserve a key place in gastronomy, in his view.
Making good viennoiseries and pastry begins, according to Álvarez, a well-known TV star in Spain, with the choice of good basic ingredients.
“One of the most important ingredients of many of my creations is butter," Álvarez explains. "Because I want to work only with products I trust one hundred per cent, I opt for Debic butter. A butter that is able to withstand heat is essential in my bakery, enabling me to work consistently even in a warm environment.”
The Challenge of Traditional Butter
A traditional butter with 82% butter fat is not fractionated. This classic basic butter therefore has a variable melting point depending on the season that is around 29°C in the summer, and around 34°C in winter. This happens naturally because cows eat fresh grass in the summer and are fed hay in the winter.
A fine, natural phenomenon! But this variable melting point directly affects the workability of the butter in a professional kitchen. For example, you can laminate perfectly well with a winter butter. But in a warm bakery in the summer, the room temperature in combination with the lower melting point of the summer butter will make the butter less pliable, making it incredibly difficult to roll out and laminate without tearing. Moreover, it is hard to predict when wholesalers will deliver summer or winter butters.
To solve this seasonal inconsistency for professional bakers, Debic offers a specialised technical butter: Debic Croissant Butter Sheet.
While it still consists of 82% premium butter fat, this butter is fractionated. This means that soft and hard fats are separated by a mechanical process, allowing the melting point to be precisely adjusted.
With a guaranteed melting point of 34-36°C, Debic Croissant Butter Sheet provides the ideal plasticity for lamination, regardless of the season or the ambient temperature of your kitchen. It guarantees the end user a constant result: perfect workability, beautiful volume, and that rich, authentic European butter flavour in every single bite. Furthermore, it contains carotene, which gives baked croissants and pastries a lovely, golden-brown colour, ensuring a visually stunning end result.
