Laminated Dough: Why We Don't Laminate Our Own Croissants
We are a scratch bakery. We make our bread, pies, pastries, cakes and sauces from scratch. So people are sometimes surprised to hear that we do not make our own croissants.
Here is the honest answer: we can't make them right in our kitchen, so we don't pretend to. Here is what goes into laminated dough, why the room matters as much as the baker, and what we do instead.
What laminated dough actually is
Laminated dough is dough and butter folded together into dozens of thin, separate layers. Not butter mixed into dough. Butter sealed between sheets of dough, so the two never become one.
It starts with a flat block of cold butter wrapped inside a sheet of dough. You roll it out long and fold it in thirds like a business letter. Roll, fold, chill. Roll, fold, chill. Every letter fold triples the number of butter layers. One block becomes 3, then 9, then 27 separate sheets of butter after three folds. Count every sheet of dough too and you will see that number quoted as 81.
The letter fold has a partner: the book fold. You bring both short ends of the dough to meet in the middle, then fold it in half like closing a book. A book fold multiplies the butter layers by four instead of three, and most bakers use the two together. One book fold and two letter folds gives you 36 sheets of butter.
Croissants and Danish are laminated yeasted doughs. Puff pastry is laminated with no yeast at all.
Where the rise comes from
Butter is roughly 80 percent fat. Most of the rest is water.
In a hot oven that water turns to steam and pushes the sheets of dough apart, while the fat around them essentially fries each layer crisp. That is the shatter you hear when you bite into a good croissant.
Why the room matters
The butter and the dough have to be the same texture and temprature when they meet. If the butter is too cold, it cracks into pieces when you roll it and you get patches instead of sheets. If it is too warm, it melts into the dough and the layers are gone for good. There is no fixing either one. You start over.
That means laminating takes a cool, steady room and a lot of time resting dough between folds. It also takes a lot of rolling. Every fold means rolling the whole block out again by hand, over and over. There is a machine for that, a dough sheeter, and it cuts the labor by about three quarters. It also costs about $10,000 and takes up a lot of floor space, and space is at a premium in our small bakery. Our kitchen runs ovens all day for bread, pies and everything else. It is the right room for what we make. It is the wrong room for croissants.
So here is what we do
Instead of making a croissant we are not proud of, we buy ours premade and frozen from a maker who does it right. We chose them for the cleanest ingredients and the closest to traditional process we could find, and we bake them fresh here.
We would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise.
How to spot a real croissant anywhere
1. Tear it open. A laminated croissant shows an open honeycomb inside: big airy cells with thin, shiny walls. A croissant shaped roll has a soft, even crumb, like a dinner roll. This is the test that never lies.
2. Look at the outside. You should see distinct ridges and edges where the layers fanned out, and a crust that flakes when you touch it.
3. Check your shirt. If you ate a croissant and there are no flakes on you, it was not much of a croissant.
Weight helps too. A real croissant feels light for its size because most of what is inside is air the steam left behind.
Want layers at home?
Biscuits get their layers from a cousin of lamination called fraisage. You work room temperature butter into the flour with your fingertips only, coating the flour in fat. When the liquid goes in, that fat coated flour is what bakes up into flaky layers. It is the technique itself that does the work.
In our Breakfast Pastries: Scones and Biscuits class on Sunday, November 8, you make buttermilk biscuits that layer properly, from start to finish.
Chef Keegan and The Lakehouse Bakery Team
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