Towards a leguminous snack

Scattered throughout my archives are a series of posts in which I take beans and boil them in (salted) water until tender.  The beans are filtered, rinsed and slowly roasted as a single layer at about 250-300F.  The texture is interesting.  They are not like the roasted chickpeas one finds in Mediterranean markets, those are vile chalky bits.  Cannellini, to this point, have been the best.  As they roast, they pop open and the frayed leguminous nuggets are left crisp.  It's fun to watch them during the roasting.  

Today I did black beans.  I often roast them with a skim of oil, but not this time.  So, salted water boil until tender, strained, rinsed and 2h roast at 300F on a sheet pan and there ya go:

Good snack?  They're pleasantly crisp and they stay that way.  They're not chalky, but were under seasoned.  I could have salted them while they were wet, prior to roasting, but I'm thinking bigger; how can I incorporate more and different flavors prior to roasting?

biscuits (layered)

Cut butter (80 g) into self-rise flour (240 g), add milk (160 g), mix together and dump shaggy mess on counter.

Gather mess together with pastry knife or spackle blade.

Fold mixture together using the blade.

After a fold with the blade, use hand to squish and flatten it out.

Repeat by folding with the blade and flattening with hand, fold in half about 3-4 times.

After folding squish into ca. 1" thick rectangle.

Cut into biscuits.

Place on parchment-lined pan and wash with whole egg.

Bake at 425°F for about 20-25 minutes. Eat.

120 gram micro scale pastry baking project.

I love dessert, but given the caloric density of carbohydrate snacks, I like them better if it's only a bite or two.  So, I've been doing a few small scale activities last couple nights making a very small batch of croissant dough.

My lean dough for this, before butter incorporation, is unbleached white flour (300 g), salt (5 g) water (175 g) and instant active yeast (Fleischmann's, 7 g).  This dough is mixed and tossed in the fridge.  After the first rise, I took 100 grams of it and rolled it into a 4" x 6" rectangle, similar (but smaller) to the folding procedure used in this post, and based on Gisseln's text.  I used 20 grams of softened butter and proceeded to fold it into 3⁴ or 81 layers.  After each fold, the dough went into the fridge to chill, not freezer - fridge.  This time, I wasn't going crazy to keep it arctic cold, that was the expt tonight.  Just chilled enough for the butter not to ooze and penetrate other layers.

The final dough was rolled to about 8 x 8" and divided.  I rolled in some apples sauteed in butter and sugar in the middle, pain au chocolat style (kinda). I gave them a long proof (another part of this expt), about an hour - thus relying less on oven spring for volume, and glazed with yolk (whole egg is a good glaze, but yolk is decadent).  They were baked on parchment at 375°F for about 25 minutes.

It's fun to be able to make a dessert like this in about 20 minutes plus baking. The rest of the lean dough is in the fridge and should be good for days.

Final Notes:

• I like this dough, it's acceptable and just about puffy enough with great texture.
• After my class at LaChatelaine and my practice, what's the "trick?" None, practice.  So far, I think the most significant part of the entire process is the final proof.  It needs to be pretty close to the final size before baking rather than underproofed and relying on the oven spring to take care of the volume.  
• The temperature of the dough during rolling is also a big deal. Moving in and out of the freezer is crazy hard to keep track of, using the fridge only, in my hands, seems more manageable.  Maybe when the dough gets to be a kg at a time, I might need greater cooling capacity, we'll see.