Croissants

Croissants are a type of French pastry known as viennoiseries, made from a leavened pastry with a significant quantity of butter that is specific to croissants. Its ancestor is a brioche style cake from Austria that was made in a crescent shape.

According to one version of the legend, the original Austrian cakes date from 1683, when a Viennese baker, up early to begin his working day, sounded the alert that allowed the City to repel the Turks who were preparing to attack at dawn after laying siege for two months. To commemorate this event, small crescent shaped cakes were made by bakers throughout the City.

Although charming stories and legends abound on the subject of who introduced croissants to France and when, it seems that they were first made in France in rue de Richelieu, Paris, in the late 1830s at the Boulangerie Viennoise of two Austrian bakers. Their croissants spawned hundreds of imitators and by 1850 croissants are listed as a commonplace baked good. At this point they were an Italian style using less butter and with egg yolk in the dough.

It isn't until the 20th century that the modern croissant emerges and becomes an icon of French cuisine, and from the 1950s it has been a traditional element of the French breakfast.

The dough for croissants is a version of puff pastry, but with yeast added to aid rising (which also allows less butter to be used). Nowadays, the classic croissant is referred to as a croissant au beurre and is no longer crescent shaped.

Croissants in our local boulangerie.

The croissants are made by first mixing the dough, made from sugar, butter, flour and water, then kneading. To achieve the flakiness, the next stage, laminating, where the dough is squeezed between two rollers, then folded into thirds, is the most important. The dough is rested for about an hour, then the rolling and folding is repeated twice, followed by another rest after each folding. The dough at this point is about 3 centimetres thick. It is rolled one last time, then cut into triangles, which are then rolled up. The newly formed croissants are left somewhere warm to rise for several hours and triple in volume. Then they are cooked at 180C so that the steam produced inside the dough causes the pastry to puff, and the exterior to crisp up.

These days there isn't much profit to be made from proper artisanal croissants made from scratch, so many bakers resort to using margarine, or frozen dough that they buy in. About 80% of the croissants sold every day are made from frozen dough.

Croissants are about 20% fat, so the advice of French dieticians is to eat them in moderation.