France / Bread
Croissant
A laminated yeasted dough with twenty-seven layers of butter. Temperature decides everything: dough and butter must be equally cold.
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
Quantities are auto-calculated from the original recipe as a guide. Items without numbers (e.g. “to taste”) are not changed.
Method 7 steps
Mix the flour, cold milk, yeast, sugar, salt and softened butter for five minutes. No longer: strong gluten fights the rolling later.
Flatten the dough into a rectangle, wrap it and refrigerate at least four hours, better overnight.
Beat the cold butter with a rolling pin into a centimetre-thick square and keep it cold. It should bend without cracking or melting.
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.
Roll it into a long rectangle and fold it in three. Chill forty minutes. Repeat twice more — three folds in all.
Roll the dough to four millimetres, cut triangles with a ten-centimetre base and roll each from the base to the tip, stretching gently.
Prove two hours at 25 °C — no warmer, or the butter runs out. Glaze with egg and bake at 200 °C for eighteen minutes.
