makes 3 medium loaves
Like all chefs (and business owners), I can’t stand waste, but waste is what you inevitably get when you make croissants. Because of the way they are shaped and rolled, there will always be less-than-perfect-looking ends. Instead of throwing them away, we use that rich, yeasty dough to make the starter we use for the next day’s croissants. However, it doesn’t take much of this dough to start a batch of croissants, so I still had excess that was going to waste.
This kept nagging at me until I came up with the idea of using the dough to make a sweet bread. I approached one of my bakers, a Uruguayan named Walter, and asked him to shape the leftover croissant dough into long tubes. I knew this dough could benefit from even more fermentation, and my guess was that the added fermentation time would provide a big boost in flavor, both from the yeast and from the lactic acid in the milk.
So Walter gave the tube-shaped loaves another 15 hours of fermenting time. The bakery smelled like a cross between a ripe banana and an open bottle of rum: yeast and alcohol pushed to their practical limit. Once baked, the result was a deliciously addictive bread I wanted to call pain sucrée or “sweet bread.” Walter, on the other hand, was in love with all things Italian and lobbied for pane dolce. As I thought about it, the bread was soft and sweet, like many Italian breads, so Walter won the day.
If you don’t have leftover croissant dough on hand, the second starter in this recipe works just as well. One final note: As you’ll see, this recipe employs two different starters, with varying amounts of water, flour, and yeast. This approach yields breads with a fuller flavor profile than those made with a single starter.