Gluten Free Croissants... not quite yet

So this has been something rolling around my head since I made gf puff pastry. I also came across Gluten Free Gobsmack's recipe and Living Without Magazine's recipe for gluten free croissants and thought it was about time to attempt my own.

Day 1 - make dough

This went pretty well. The dough was sticky and a little slimy from the xanthan gum, but it had some promise.

Day 2 - add turns of butter

The plastic bag I had put the dough in to rest in the fridge over night, was full of air - the yeasties were working!
I rolled out the dough and added in the butter.




The dough got really dry and was starting to not hold together, so I put a little egg wash on it before adding the last turn of butter. (I believe this was a pretty giant err on my part)


I rolled it out, then returned it to its ziplock bag for a cool night in the fridge.

Day 3 - Rolling, cutting, rolling, proofing, baking, eating

I divided the dough in 2 and rolled it out on parchment. For about 1/3 I added a mixture of chopped, dried slab apricots and sliced almonds that soaked for an hour in vanilla simple syrup.

I rolled them up, and let them proof for 30 minutes - nothing happened. Then I made a proofer by turning the oven on 200F, shutting it off, putting in the trays of croissants and placing a pan of hot water in the bottom of the oven. Another hour - nothing. I decided to brush them with egg wash and bake them off anyway.



You can see they didn't really puff and the layers totally got flattened together. The result was much more pie dough and croissant, but the filling was tasty!

I think I completely overworked the dough. Maybe halving the batch and using frozen butter would have worked.