French cuisine
Croissant
A laminated yeasted dough with twenty-seven layers of butter. Temperature decides everything: dough and butter must be equally cold.
- Prep
- 180 min
- Cook
- 20 min
- Total
- 200 min
- Difficulty
- Takes practice
Ingredients
- Strong flour500 g
- Cold milk280 ml
- Fresh yeast15 g
- Sugar55 g
- Salt11 g
- Butter for the dough — softened40 g
- Butter for laminating — 82% fat280 g
- Egg for glazing1
Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.
Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.
Method
- 1
Mix the flour, cold milk, yeast, sugar, salt and softened butter for five minutes. No longer: strong gluten fights the rolling later.
8 min
- 2
Flatten the dough into a rectangle, wrap it and refrigerate at least four hours, better overnight.
240 min
- 3
Beat the cold butter with a rolling pin into a centimetre-thick square and keep it cold. It should bend without cracking or melting.
12 min
- 4
Roll the dough to twice the size of the butter square, lay the butter in the middle and fold the edges over it like an envelope, sealing the seams.
10 min
- 5
Roll it into a long rectangle and fold it in three. Chill forty minutes. Repeat twice more — three folds in all.
150 min
- 6
Roll the dough to four millimetres, cut triangles with a ten-centimetre base and roll each from the base to the tip, stretching gently.
20 min
- 7
Prove two hours at 25 °C — no warmer, or the butter runs out. Glaze with egg and bake at 200 °C for eighteen minutes.
140 min
About the dish
A croissant rises on steam from the butter rather than on yeast. Yeast gives flavour and lightness, but what forces the layers apart is water evaporating out of the butter between them. That is why the butter must never merge into the dough at any stage.
Dough and butter have to be the same consistency — both cold and equally pliable. Warm butter is absorbed into the dough; butter too cold shatters into pieces and tears the sheet.
Three folds in three give twenty-seven layers. More is not wanted: past fifty or so the layers grow too thin and merge.
Worth knowing
- — If butter starts showing through the dough while rolling, into the fridge immediately for twenty minutes. Carrying on is pointless.
- — Proving above 26 °C ruins everything: the butter melts, runs onto the tray and the layers collapse.
- — Shaped croissants freeze well. Thaw and prove them overnight in the fridge, then two hours in the warm.
Nutrition
Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.
- Calories
- 420 kcal
- Protein
- 8 g
- Fat
- 26 g
- Carbs
- 40 g
Useful for this recipe
More from France
- Ratatouille — A Provençal vegetable stew where each vegetable is cooked separately before they meet — otherwise it turns to mush.
- French onion soup — Soup from onions, stock and cheese-topped bread. All of the flavour comes from caramelisation, which takes forty minutes rather than twenty.
- Coq au vin — Chicken braised in red wine with bacon, mushrooms and small onions. Marinating the day before does half the work.