Delicious sesame seed crackers 

As usual, one thing leads to another in the kitchen. As I mentioned in my last post I was not entirely comfortable publishing that recipe because I live a sugar-free life and those delicious pastries contain a fair bit of the white stuff. I even tried laminating the dough with honey to see if it might make a good sugar substitute (it almost always does). But working with soft butter and runny honey made the lamination process very messy. The honey-filled pastry also didn’t turn out as flaky as it should. It had a cakey texture, which I suspect has to do with the hygroscopic quality honey has. So I decided to leave the sugar out of the recipe entirely to find out what a savory version of this pastry looked like. I figured the result should be a reasonable stand-in for puff pastry.

A few days ago, finding myself with a bag of Kenji Lopez-Alt’s excellent Neapolitan pizza dough fermenting in the refrigerator, I gave it a go. Using 100 grams of dough I followed the recipe for Kouign Amann in my last postsans sucre. It worked like a charm, puffing up beautifully in the oven. I rolled out the leftover scraps very thin and sprinkled them with seeds and salt. Those crackers were so deadly I asked my husband to hide them somewhere. (He ate them.)

So if you are like me and don’t like the idea of a sugar-laced pastry,  just leave it out and enjoy some of these savory preparations. The possibilities are actually pretty endless for this pastry. Neopolitans? Bouchées à la reine? Pain au chocolat? Palmiers? Turnovers? Apple dumplings? CroissantsPourquoi pas

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