Croissants for beginners

It's layering season!

Jessica Battilana and I are holding our first Substack Live on Friday, May 8 from 9 to 10 a.m. EST. Pour yourself a strong cup of coffee and join us. Hetty Lui McKinnon and Nicola Lamb will be stopping by. BYO scone.

To put myself in the headspace to record the croissant episode of our podcast, I dug deep into the archives of the internet. I wanted to remind myself what croissants looked like 10, 20 years ago; I remembered them as different pastries than the ones we valorize now, but I needed proof. Surely somebody — some blogger — uploaded a dozen photos of croissants sometime in the early aughts?

Yup. And it was exactly what I needed to confirm my hunch. The croissants in the blog post I found (which features what were, allegedly, the best croissants in Paris in 2009) are golden, flaky, and very delicious-looking, but of an entirely different aesthetic than the one we judge croissants by today. They have thick, hard-to-distinguish layers; not one of them has the honeycomb structure that I think of as being the gold standard now.

Now this is honeycomb, honey.

Layers are the central concern of a croissant-maker. The process of laminating dough is essentially just a very precise layering of butter and détrempe (the yeasted dough that is the base of many laminated pastries). Layers are also bragging rights. A traditional croissant has 55 layers (or 163 layers, depending on how you count — it’s complicated), and getting all those layers right used to be a badge of honor for a pastry chef. And it still is. But it’s no longer the only way. Modern croissants are often made with less folds, resulting in a fraction of the layers that, somewhat surprisingly, lead to a more open structure. (Hello, honeycomb!)

This is good news for the home baker. Fewer folds means less manipulation of the dough, and less manipulation means less opportunity for things to go wrong when making croissants at home. As King Arthur baking school instructor Elisabeth Berthasavage, our guest on this week’s episode, explains, one of the trickiest parts of making croissants is keeping the butter block pliable and intact. Temperature is key — the butter must stay cool — and warm hands are the enemy. The less we touch the dough, the better.

Fear of folding is one of the reasons people avoid making their own croissants. But it’s only scary if you haven’t tried it. If you want to start (and spring is a good time, before we get into the butter-melting heat of summer), start by listening to my interview with Elisabeth — she has a lot of great tips for newbies. Then maybe check out her Intro to Laminated Doughs class. If you don’t get a honeycomb structure on your first try, don’t worry about it. They’re not wrong. They’re just vintage.

Things Bakers Know is sponsored by Brød & Taylor. Your best bread is within reach. Brød & Taylor builds tools that help you get there. See what’s possible at brodandtaylor.com.

Bake of the Week

Every fall at King Arthur the Editorial and Education team (of which Jessica and I are proud members) throws a party for the larger Marketing department. A few years ago it was a breakfast party, and of course, Jessica and I wanted to make freshly fried doughnuts to order. A huge kettle of oil over a camping stove outside one of our office buildings — what could go wrong? Needless to say, the safety department shut down our idea, so our colleague Molly made doughnut muffins instead. And let me tell you, nobody missed the real doughnuts (except Jessica). This is the newest version of that recipe, which adds maple to the mix.

Follow these crumbs

Am I being trolled? Everybody on Substack is talking about bananas right now:

• First there was this lovely essay by my friend Rumaan Alam

• Then Dorie Greenspan wrote about a chocolate-banana tart

• And here’s a new Chocolate-Tahini Banana Bread from Yossy Arefi

My aversion to bananas runs so deep that I can’t be in the same room with somebody who is eating one. (This is sometimes a problem on the New York City subway, where people increasingly eat bananas in the cars. I am not so crazy that I will jump out of a moving train to get away from a banana. But I think about it!) Nevertheless, I ate up (sorry) Rumaan’s essay, and I would gladly eat Yossy’s banana bread (I just pretend banana bread contains no bananas). That chocolate tart, though, is probably the one thing on Earth Dorie could offer me that I wouldn’t take.

• Is there rhubarb out where you live? If so, can you send me some? I’m waiting patiently to make my yearly batch of these swirled rhubarb bars.

• Here are the full show notes from our croissant episode.

• And here’s a tiny croissant cookie that the test kitchen is working on. Recipe coming soon!