Recipe: pain suisse

Golden buttery laminated pastry, wrapped up with a filling of vanilla-flecked crème pâtissière, rich dark chocolate and creamy, moorish caramelised white chocolate.

These are crisp on the outside, and unciously custardy and soft on the inside. The crème pât seems to almost caramelise while baking which intensifies its flavour, and melts together with the dark and white chocolate to become a soft and chewy mass of deliciousness–the bits that ooze out of the sides and caramelise are my favourite. I have only ever had pain suisse with dark chocolate, but had caramelised white chocolate on hand so decided to add that too–a great decision. Regular white chocolate would work very well here too, or you could keep it classic and just use dark chocolate.

The process of making laminated dough is a labour of love, but a very rewarding one. The more you learn about it, the more exciting the process becomes, and the more you want to practise. Pain suisse is one of my favourite pastries, and one that I would often get back in Glasgow–if you happen to be there, Burnfield Bakery’s one is very good. I haven’t managed to find any bakeries making pain suisse here in Sweden (yet), and after talking to a friend who showed me an incredible one she was enjoying from a bakery down in Malmö, I knew instantly what my next viennoiserie adventure was going to be.

I made these over 2 days:
Day 1: making the dough and crème pât
Day 2: laminating, shaping, proving and baking

You could make these over three days, though, which would ensure you have fresh pain suisse to have for breakfast. It would look like:
Day 1: making the dough
Day 2: laminating and making crème pât
Day 3: shaping, proving and baking

The recipe below details how to make them over 2 days, but if you plan to make them over 3, after the final fold during lamination, place the dough in the freezer for 20 minutes and then transfer to the fridge overnight and resume the recipe from where you left off the next day–I will add this note to the recipe. This uses the same dough as my morning buns–the recipe for the buns includes footnotes to describe various processes throughout. I highly recommend going and reading through those if you are new to lamination.