Come and meet the new queen!

The queen I refer to, of course, is "Kougin-amann", pronounced "Queen Amann". It's a pastry, and it's from Brittany (and that's a region of France).

I learned the name of it when I was looking up another recipe entirely, and decided I had to try it. It's made of a dough just like croissant dough, but with sugar added between some of the layers along with the block of butter. The various recipes I've read disagree in just how to do this, so for now, my method is to sprinkle sugar generously over the dough just before it gets folded the last time.

And the result? Oh, goodness me, delicious. Here's one from the batch I took to a Christmas party. The kids had some too, and they didn't last long.

So today, I tried the very same recipe, same methods, and one difference - using sourdough in place of yeast. It certainly needed longer to rise, but that's no surprise. Hey, it's Sunday, we have all day.  After that, I handled it the same. 

Here's our pastries before baking:

See, it's just a simple corners-to-the-middle fold. Those couple that are trying to unfold are splitting along the layer where the sugar was added. So, that'll be why there are different methods around. The next try, I'll be blending sugar into the butter, then making a butter block from that.

And here is one of my sourdough Kouign-Amanns. I am pretty much thrilled with that!