Contents
Lamination is butter in sheets rather than in lumps. A block of fat is folded into a dough repeatedly until there are hundreds of alternating layers, and in the oven the water in that butter turns to steam and drives the layers apart. Nothing else is lifting a croissant — no yeast contribution comes close to what the steam does — which is why butter's water content and the dough's temperature matter more here than in any other kind of baking.
Part of Baking. The wider pastry overview is pastry.
The doughs
- Puff pastry — no yeast at all; steam alone
- Croissant dough — yeasted and laminated, so it proofs as well as puffs
- Danish — yeasted, laminated, and enriched with egg
- Rough puff and the shortcuts that trade layer count for time
- Kouign-amann and the sugar-laminated variants
Technique
- The détrempe and the butter block, and getting both to the same plasticity
- Single (letter) folds against double (book) folds, and the layer arithmetic
- Temperature discipline: butter too cold shatters, too warm merges into the dough
- Resting between turns so the gluten relaxes
- Shaping, proofing, and the egg wash
- Oven heat and the first ten minutes — see ovens and heat
Butter
European-style butter runs higher in fat and lower in water than standard butter, which changes both plasticity and the amount of steam available. See baking fats.
Nearby
Folded and layered flatbreads use the same idea with far fewer turns and no oven: paratha, msemen, and the pan-cooked layered breads in flatbreads and bread-world-table.
Related
pastry · pies and tarts · bread · flour · baking equipment · Baked goods · cookies — rugelach and the other cream-cheese doughs sit between the two pages, and they are the cookie family that can never skip the chill