Croissants with plum jam – old Romanian recipe

This recipe will give you the most tender croissants you will ever cook. The secret of it is this one ingredient that might surprise you at first. Pork fat! I can reassure you that you will not feel any taste of pork in your dessert, just the incredible tenderness of these delicious Romanian cookies.

I made for this recipe home made plum jam with no sugar, but you can just as well use any other jam, preferably not too sweet.

Traditional Romanian “croissants”
Servings: 30 pieces
Time: 1 hour
Difficulty: medium

Ingredients

• 140g of pork fat
• 300g of flour
• 2 packs of vanilla sugar
• a pinch of salt
• one egg yolk
• 50g of sour cream
• 3-4 tbsp of white wine
• jam
• powder sugar

Directions

1. Mix the flour, pork fat, sour cream, egg yolk, salt, sugar and wine until the ingredients are combined. Then you can put it on the table and mix the dough with your hands until it becomes not sticky and elastic. Add a bit more flour if necessary.
2. Let the dough rest in the fridge (covered) for half an hour.
3. Split the dough in two and form one round shape of each half.
4. Cut the round shape in 16 parts.
5. Put a bit of jam at the base of each triangle.
6. Roll each part in a croissant shape.
   

   

   

   
7. Place the croissants next to each other (they will not rise in the oven) and bake them for 30 min at 180º Celcius.
8. Once they are baked, roll them in powder sugar and they are ready to be served warm or after they cool down completely.