The pastry chef who used a thermometer on my dough last Tuesday

I walked into the prep kitchen at our place in Austin last Tuesday and saw our new pastry cook checking my croissant dough with a meat thermometer. He told me it was 74 degrees and that I should have proofed it longer, which was wrong because I had already accounted for the warm corner near the oven. Has anyone else had to explain why a thermometer read doesn't beat feel and timing after 10 years on the line?

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emma_mitchell10d ago

And yeah, that new guy is going to learn the hard way that dough has moods, not numbers. The thermometer tells you a fact, but it doesn't tell you what the dough has been through all morning. Give him a few months and he'll start trusting his hands again, or he won't, and then you'll be back to training someone else.