Croissant Recipe from Scratch (small batch recipe) - Dessert for Two (2024)

FAQs

What is the best flour to use for croissants? ›

Although you can produce excellent croissants from all-purpose flour, bread flour, or frozen packaged white dough, the high gluten content makes for hard and rubbery rolling out. A mixture of 2 parts unbleached pastry flour and 1 part unbleached all-purpose flour gives a dough that is much easier to handle.

First: use high-protein bread flour. The extra protein gives you the gluten structure to support all those thin layers. Second secret? We'll learn to laminate the dough using a tri-fold process that creates 109 distinct layers of butter and dough—giving us the croissant's distinctive crunch and flavor at home.

What butter should I use? French boulangeries use butter that has a high fat content of 85 to 87 percent. For best results use quality butter with a high fat content and no additives or extra water. European style or imported butters can often be found in specialty grocery stores.

While the first type of croissant is considered sweet and is eaten during breakfast or tea, the second type is a more filling meal and is usually considered a sandwich and often prepared for picnics or as travel food.

The layers which make up a croissant is a result of a process called laminating, where butter is folded into the dough multiple times to create alternating layers of butter and dough. This step is crucial in the process to ensure the steam effectively lifts the layers apart during baking.

For those of you who are abroad, you may notice that a lot of my recipes calls for T45 flour. If you don't have this on hand, you can mix some all-purpose flour with corn starch to have a quick alternative to cake flour at home. Cake Flour – 1 cup minus 2 tbsp (100g) all purpose flour + 2 tbsp cornstarch.

By law, only a croissant made with 100% pure butter can wear a straight shape as a badge of honor. A croissant made with any other fat, such as margarine or (sacrebleu!) oil, must disclose its impurity with a curved shape.

Under or over-proofing the croissants

Failing to proof your croissant dough for long enough is a common mistake that most commonly results in croissants leaking butter while baking, a tight crumb, and a flat, undeveloped flavor. Inversely, over-proofing croissant dough presents its own set of problems.

Your butter needs to be pliable and at the same time not too soft at the moment of usage. Help, butter leaks out when baking! Your croissants were probably under-proofed.

A classic French croissant has 55 layers (27 layers of butter), achieved with a French fold followed by 3 letter folds. Less layers will mean a different texture (less tender, more chewy, with more defined layers). Too many layers bring a risk of the butter getting too thin and melting into the dough.

Who makes Kirkland butter for Costco? ›

That's what Costco buyer Mark Klauber and his team were searching for when they collaborated with Westland Milk Products in Hokitika, New Zealand, to create Kirkland Signature™ Grass-Fed Butter, launched in 2021.

It isn't necessarily bad to eat a croissant every day. While croissants cannot offer all essential nutrients, you can up the health value by adding other nutritious foods to your croissant such as fresh fruit or veggies.

While croissants do provide some nutritional benefits, they're also high in fats and calories. They're best enjoyed as part of a balanced diet, rather than a daily breakfast item. Pairing a croissant with fruits, lean proteins, and other nutrient-dense foods can help balance your meal.

Across various accounts of croissant history, most sources agree that it originates from Austria as the kipferl.

Type 00 flour from strong organic wheat suitable for ciabatta, baguettes, brioches, croissants and as a general bread flour.

Croissants are made of yeasted laminated dough, and F&W Food Editor Paige Grandjean's time-tested lamination technique makes a base recipe that you can use for flaky layers in many other baked goods, like Kouign-Amann, biscuits, and anything made with puff pastry, like palmier cookies.

Pastry flour is a versatile ingredient perfect for creating baked goods such as pie dough, cookies, and biscuits. It has a protein content lower than all-purpose flour and higher than cake flour. This unique balance makes pastry flour an excellent choice for achieving a flaky and light texture in your baked treats.

Taste and style play a part too. For example, while 30 years ago when I started baking T45-type flour were commonly used for viennoiserie (think croissant, puff pastry, brioche), today T55-type flours are commonly used for making them as this gives more flavour.