The Complete Guide to Making French Croissants

1. Introduction to Croissants : Artisan French croissant, indulgent [inaudible]. Is there anything better than taking out a tray of freshly baked croissant from your home oven? Hi. My name is Shubranshu and I'm a professional chef and baker, trained from the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu. I've worked in some of the best restaurants and bakeries in Sydney over many years. Now I want to share the experiences I've gained working with some amazing bakers and chefs. This class covers all the steps in the croissant making process. I will explain in detail about the ingredients as they are essential for making an amazing croissant. Then we make the dough from scratch and learn how to develop gluten and also how to ferment the dough. The next step, we make the butter block, which is so important to make professional pastries at home. Then we move on to the most important step of laminating the dough and learn in detail about the single turn and the double turn. After finishing the lamination process, we move on to my favorite step of shaping the dough into beautiful croissant. I will explain in detail about the proofing process and show the different stages of proofing the croissant to get the lightest space free balsam. We will then assess the final croissant and I'll share with you some common mistakes I made when I started out on this journey. This class also comes with a bonus lesson on how to make chocolate croissant from scratch. It doesn't matter if you're a beginner, intermediate or pro, this class is made for everyone. The class also comes with a detailed recipe book with tips and tricks and commonly asked questions so you can master the art of baking amazing croissant. I'm so excited to get started with this class and I hope you'll join me to learn to make an amazing croissant at home. 2. Class Project: The project for this class is for you to share your pictures of the beautiful croissant you make at home so that I can review it and help you achieve better results. Also, if you like the class, please review it so it will help me make more classes and if you have any suggestions of anything you would like to learn, please comment that as well and please message me. I will definitely try to teach you different aspects of baking and patisserie. Thank you again for joining on this class. 3. Professional Tips to Help You Succeed: Before we begin the lesson, I want to share with you some tips which will really help you in your croissant journey. The first one is that use really good quality butter. I cannot stress this enough because if you use a butter which is salted or it has less than 82 percent fat, it will definitely melt or crack when you're rolling the croissant dough. Just make sure to get the best butter because it bakes very well, and it also gives a really open texture when you bake the croissant. Also, the flour we use has to have a protein content of at least 12 percent to 14 percent because you need a strong dough to be able to hold the different layers during fermentation and to get a nice and open texture. It is really important to get a good flour, and definitely, use a white flour because that will give you the best result. The third one is during the proofing time. This is at stage where most students make mistakes. It's really normal to make mistakes as well because it's a little bit hard to judge initially when the croissant is proofed. Personally, it took me a lot of time as well to be able to judge it properly. What I would suggest is write down on a notebook how much time you give each time you make the croissant and just check the different results you get because you'll be able to cut down on your mistakes, and you could do this for other steps as well, not just for this one. Just keep writing down on a notebook how it turned out and what could have gone wrong during the process because that would help you improve as a baker as well. The fourth one is when we bake the croissant, the oven has to be nicely preheated, and preferably have a surface or a tray where you can put the croissant when you bake it because you need that initial heat because if you don't get that initial heat, the croissant inside dries really bad. Definitely, the fifth one is to practice as much as you can. Do not expect to get a perfect croissant in your first try because it really takes a lot of effort and practice, because it's a little bit of a difficult pastry to master. But with practice, you will definitely get there. I hope this class helps you honestly because I wanted to share as much skill and knowledge whatever I have gained with you. I hope this really helps you become an amazing baker. 4. Tools For Making Croissant : I just wanted to speak briefly about the tools we'll need for this class. I'm going to start with the most important one, which is the scale. You need this when we laminate the dough, when we make the butter block, as well as when we stretch the dough. Because we don't have professional tools like a dough sheeter, we need to make sure that we follow the measurement as accurately as we can to get the correct thickness. The next one is the rolling pin. I'm going to use a wooden rolling pin. This has handles on the side, but you could also use a French rolling pin which is flat completely. Just make sure that the rolling pin you use, you're not exerting a lot of strength on the dough because we don't want to crush the layers. I prefer using a wooden one, but you could also use a stainless steel one. The next one is the basic brush. This is really important because we use this to brush off excess flour from the dough. The reason we use this is because if there's a lot of flour on the surface of the dough, it might prevent it from having a really open crumb when you pick the brush off. This is one of my favorite tools as well. The next one is a thermometer. I use this when I make the dough just to make sure that the dough temperature is about 27 degrees and it does not exceed that. This is quite helpful in that case. The other one is a bench scraper. I usually use this when I make the dough. It just makes the workflow quite neat and the bench remains quite neat as well. The next one is a chef's knife. Make sure that you use a sharp knife. This is because we want to cut the croissant really neatly and we don't want to damage the layers when we portion the croissant. Also, it's useful when you trim the dough. Get a good sharp chef's knife. That's what I would recommend. Also, just keep a bowl of flour just so that you can access it when you're working. I'm also using a piece of baking sheet. This is useful in two cases: One is when we make the butter block because we are going to be making a butter block in the baking sheet, and the second one is when we bake the croissant. If you have silicon mats at home, you could use that as well because that's what we use in professional bakeries. But this is what we have usually at home, just use a baking paper. 5. All About the Ingredients : I'm just going to briefly introduce you to the ingredients we are going to be using today. We're going to use some unsalted European style butter. The European style butter has fat content of about 82 percent, which is really good in the croissant dough because it has less water content and it's basically unsalted. If you go to the grocery shop, just get some unsalted butter and just make sure that the fat percentage is about 82 percent because it just makes it better dough. The flour we're going to use today is bakers flour. Bakers flour has a protein content of anywhere between 12-14 percent and it's quite helpful to use this because it forms a stronger dough. When we're laminating the dough, we have basically layers of dough and butter. When the dough proves, when we shape the croissant, it needs to form a strong bond of gluten. Because if it doesn't have a good gluten structure, the croissant tends to crack. You need to have a protein content of at least above 10 percent and I won't to use cake flour at all, but in some cases, if the plain flour has protein content of above 10 percent, definitely you can go for that. We've also got some caster sugar and yeast. The caster sugar is quite helpful because it has smaller grains and it dissolves quite easily when you make the dough. We're going to be using some instant yeast. Instant yeast, you don't really have to bloom. You can just directly add to the dough. We also have some table salt, and this is just some milk and water. This is at room temperature. You don't want to heat this up because you're going to be adding butter to the dough, so we don't want the butter to split. This is just going to be at room temperature. Now we're going to go ahead and mix the dough. 6. Dough- Start to Finish: To make the dough, I'm going to add some flour and I'm going to add the sugar and the yeast. The salt, just put it on the side. It shouldn't touch the yeast. Mix it. Then I'm going to add the butter. Just mix it slightly, not too much. Then add the milk and the water. We want to make a really strong dough because it's going to ferment over two days, and also you want the croissant to retain its structure. When we get a rough dough, we're going to just move that to the table, and we're going to start kneading it. Just push it forward and just push it back. We're going to do this for about 4-5 minutes and just check how the dough looks like. We want to get a smooth dough. This is what the dough looks like after three minutes of kneading. If you're doing this in a stand mixer, you can just knead it for about 6-7 minutes. But when we do it with hand, it just takes a little bit more time. At this point, we're just going to make a rough dough and let it sit for like 15-20 minutes, and then we'll give the dough a turn to develop more gluten. Just cover it with a bowl. We're just going to give this a turn. It's been about 15 minutes. You already feel the dough feels most stronger. We're just going to need this for maybe 30 seconds. Now, I'm just going to rest this for about 30 minutes. Now, I'm going to give it a final turn. The dough looks really nice now. Just give it one final turn. I'm just going to ferment this for 30 minutes. Our dough is now ready to be frozen. Just deflate it. I'll show you how you can know. Just take some dough and just stretch it. You'll see it will form a windowpane. If it forms a thin windowpane, and if the windowpane does not tear, that means we have a good gluten structure. So the dough is ready, such as slightly deflate the dough. The reason we put this in the freezer for two hours is to stop the fermentation because we don't want dough to ferment. This makes sure that it's completely covered with plastic and it does not get exposed to the air because it will tend to dry out. 7. Butter Block for Lamination : I prefer making a butter block, which is basically a square of 17 into 17 centimeters. This results in an even butter layer and you don't really put uneven pieces of butter, and makes it easier to laminate as fast. Now what you're going to do is we're going to flip this because we don't want the ink to touch the butter. I'm just going to take the butter. This is about 250 grams of unsalted butter and we're just going to cut it into chunks, and just layer it. What we do now is we'll just fold it, just over each side, just following the line. Since the butter is really hard, I'm just going to let it sit for about 10-15 minutes and then I'm going to evenly make a butter block. I'm just going to set this aside now. The butter is tempered now and I'm just going to put some pressure on the butter and just make an even butter block, just push towards the side. We need to make sure that the butter block is of even thickness when we use it to laminate in the dough. We need to chill this butter now for about 20-30 minutes because it's really soft and we cannot use it immediately. Once I laminate the dough, I'll show you the consistency of the butter. 8. Laminate the Dough: This is a dough from yesterday. You're just going to stretch this to about 17 centimeters in breadth and about 34 centimeters in width. I'm going to show you the consistency of the butter. It should bend. But it should still feel solid, like it shouldn't be melted and it should be quite pliable because if it's too hard, the butter will crack in the dough. If it's too soft, it won't spread as well and it will start to leak. I think it takes some practice and time to understand. But as you keep doing it, you'll be able to judge the consistency of the butter in a better way. Just going to put this in the center. Just fold it and seal the edges. Let's put a little bit of flour and just press it. This will help to evenly spread the butter. I can already feel it's quite nicely spread. Now we're just going to stretch this into about 60 centimeters. Just make sure you're putting even pressure throughout. We want to get as even as possible. You don't want very thick edges. I'm just going to trim the edges here because they don't have a lot of butter in them. I'm going to give this a single fold, brush off the flour. I'm just going to wrap this and put it in the fridge for about 45 minutes. Then I'm going to finish giving it another fold. It's time to give the dough a second turn. Just a little bit of flour. You always want to stretch the dough from the side where the seam is, that you folded. I have a seam here. I'm just going to start from this side. Then you turn it. If at any point the dough starts to pull back and it's not stretching as well, just put it back in the fridge and let it rest because sometimes the glutamine gets quite tight and you don't want to force yourself to stretch the dough because all the butter is going to start melting. We have to be quite gentle with the dough as well. Again, just make sure that the layers are even and brush off all the flour. We're about done, we take this about 1/2 the way and this one about 1/3 of the way and just fold it like that. It basically forms a book. If you see, it's looks like a book. We're done with laminating the dough. We're going to chill this for about one hour. Then we're going to stretch it and shape our croissant. I'm just going to show you the layers. You can see see all the butter and the flour layers. This is really good lamination. You exactly want this. 9. Cutting and Shaping Croissants: Just a little bit of flour. Don't put too much pressure on the dough, just let it stretch on its own. You don't want to break the layers, but at the same time we need to keep it even. This is perfect, this is about 25 centimeters. I'm just going to stretch this a little bit more. Perfect. Now what we're going to do, we just going to trim the sides. We're going to take about nine centimeters from the base. Just make a cut here and here. And just take a scale and just cut it like that. Then we going to cut this into half. Just like that. Perfect. I'm just going to chill this for about 15 minutes, just put it on a tray, cover it, and then I'm going to shape the final croissant. I'm going to show you how to shape the croissant. We just pull it gently from here, then stretch it just to make it even, pull it back. Then we just tuck this in and roll it like that. You don't want to put too much pressure, and just the end, we stick it and the end has to go down. This is how it looks like. Just very even on this layers. I'm going to show you another technique of doing this. It's the same. I just want to stretch it. Stretch it from the bottom just a little bit. What we're going to do now is we're going to make a small cut here, same, and just fold it very gently, and just tuck it here. This makes slightly more curved croissant on the sides. But it's quite beautiful as well. 10. Proofing Techniques : You should get about 5-6 even croissant. I'm just going to go over this with a glad wrap, a plastic wrap, and just set it aside at a temperature of about 25-27 degrees and just prove it for about 2-3 hours. I just wanted to say if it's really hot, like if it's above 30 degrees, the butter will start to melt. You have to be really careful. Maybe just put it in a cool room or put it in the fridge for sometime just to lower the temperature. Another thing you could do is just individually cut the baking sheets for each croissant. You can experiment with your oven and see what temperature works best to bake them. I'm going to bake them at different temperatures and see what works for my oven. Then you can see what works for your oven as well because every oven is different. This is not a professional oven, so it's a nice exercise to do. You can also see how long you need to bake them. I've cut them on individual sheets, I'm going to show you how it bakes at different levels of proofing time. Maybe this one, I'll bake after two hours and I'll show you what happens if it's underproofed as well, like how it turns out. I'm just going to wrap this with glad wrap, plastic wrap and just set it aside. I'll show you some of the common mistakes you could make as well. I'll see after two hours. That is what the croissant looks like after two hours. It's become about one and-a-half times the original size, but it's not fully proved yet. One of the biggest mistakes people make is they usually bake it at this point. If you bake it at this point, the center of the croissant will be quite dense because it won't be able to rise to its full capacity. I reckon we probably give this about half an hour more and then check again. I just want to show you how the croissant looks like when it's finally proved for baking. If you move it, it will have a slight wobble. If it's wobbling, that means that it's ready to be baked. 11. Baking tips for Home Ovens: A few tips and tricks you could use in your home oven when you're baking the croissant. What I usually do is I pre-heat a tray and this can be any tray you have. The reason I do that is to get that initial heat that the croissant requires to rise. Sometimes what happens especially in the case of my oven, the bottom heating element is not strong and the top heating element is stronger than the bottom heating element. The top gets color and it sets faster than the bottom does, so the croissant is quite dense. To avoid that, we want to give the croissant initial heat, which we call as an oven spring. Because if we get a good oven spring, we'll get lighter croissant, which will tend to rise more. You can definitely use this technique in your home oven, and you could use any tray you have available. I just wanted to share with you because this might be helpful to you when you're baking the croissant. The other option you have is to get a baking stone or a baking steel. This is a baking steel. What I'm trying to do is basically recreate a professional deck oven. I pre-heat this as well for about 30 minutes. Because it absorbs a lot of heat, when I individually load the croissant on this, it gets really nice rise as well. You could do the same with a baking stone. I find this really convenient. If you want to make that investment, you could do that as well. This is also really good if you want to make pizza or other types of breads. It's very useful in my oven because I don't have a bottom heating element, I just have a top heating element, that's why it really helps me to bake breads. Before the experiences I had was that it did not rise enough and they were quite dense. This is something which might help you in your home oven as well. 12. Importance of steam in Baking: One of the most important things, when we're baking the croissant, is to generate steam in the oven. When we have professional ovens, we generate steam automatically in that oven because we have that option available, but at home, our ovens don't have that option and that makes a big difference when you're baking croissant. The reason we need steam in the oven is because it delays the crust from forming. In our case, if we have steam, the croissant will tend to rise more and the crust of the croissant will be delayed the setting of the crust. We could just get a bottle of water, this is just a spray bottle, you could get it in any gardening store. What I usually do is, when I am preheating the oven and when I load the croissant, then I spray some water across the oven, especially on the top of the oven because that's where most of the heat is concentrated and what that does is that creates steam across the oven. Just make sure, when you do this, you do it right at the end. When you load the croissant, you just spray the water in your oven and you close the door immediately because you want the steam to stay inside the oven. This really helped me to get a really good result and I've tried baking it without the steam and the results aren't as great. This is something you should definitely experiment with in your oven because it will make a big difference. 13. Baking Setup: I'm just going to egg wash this. Egg wash is basically one egg with a tablespoon of cream. When I bake this, I'm just going to individually put this like that, and I'm just going to take a bottle with some water and just spray it on the top to create steam. I just bake it for 200 degrees for about 15 -18 minutes. When they come out of the oven, we need to cool them down for about 15 minutes because they're still baking as they cool down, and we want to get a really open honeycomb. So for that, all the moisture needs to dry out. When they come out of the oven, I like to brush them with some melted butter. This basically gives it a really nice shine. 14. What Makes a Good Croissant : I just wanted to discuss with you what I think makes a good croissant. All the layers are really even and it's risen quite well. It's really light, very airy, and it's got a really nice structure as well. I'm just going to cut open and see how it looks like from the inside. If you see, it's got a really nice crumb, very open. This is something you should be aiming for. I know it might take a few tries, but keep trying and keep experimenting and see how it turns out. I'm going to show you the crumb of this croissant, just have a look at this. It's really open. It's really beautiful. 15. Underproofed vs Overproofed: This is how a croissant looks like. You can see all the layers really well. That means the lamination was done really nicely. It's very flaky as well. But I feel like it was just slightly underproofed. I'm going to bake the next one now because that would be, I think, at the perfect level of fermentation. This is an overproofed croissant. You can see it's really flat. This usually happens because the gluten structure cannot hold when you bake it and it completely collapses and you get a really flat croissant. Another reason why this could happen is because the flour doesn't have enough protein and when the croissant expands when it bakes, it doesn't hold its structure and it folds and also if the lamination is not done correctly. But in this case, the lamination is really good because you can see all the layers. But it's just because it's been overproofed. 16. Baking in Hot and Cold Weather: I just wanted to briefly discuss about some tips when you're baking in really hot weather. I have personally experienced this. I know it's quite hard to do because the butter starts to melt above 30 degrees. When it's really humid, the dough tends to prove very fast as well. There are few things we could do and that would be just to work maybe at night when it's colder. If you have an air conditioner, maybe just turn that on when you're working. The other trick I use sometimes, when I used to work at the bakery, I used to use this as well, is you can just take some ice and just put a cloth on your workbench. The rule of doing this is just to keep our workbench really cold. You just put the ice on the cloth and just let it sit. You could even put some salt on this so that the ice doesn't melt and just let this sit on your workbench. So your workbench gets quite cold. This would really help you because when you're laminating the dough or when you're sheeting the dough, dough will not melt as soon as it usually does. The other thing you could do is keep all your utensils like your rolling pin or your pastry brush, just put that in the fridge so it's really cold. This would also help you in keeping the dough quite cold. The rolling pin especially helps a lot. If it's cold, when you laminate the dough or when you sheet the dough, the cold rolling pin helps the layers to stay quiet even and not to melt. I hope this really helps you when you're baking in hot weather. I also wanted to share with you some tricks you could use when the weather is really cold, especially if you live in the mountains and if it's winter. What I have observed is the dough tense to prove really slowly. The way you could solve this problem, is you could put the dough in an area where the heater is on, but also make sure that the room is not very hot, like it's not above 28-30 degrees. When you're proofing the croissant, you could use two methods. One is, you could put a bowl of hot water in your oven and you could put the tray of croissant in the oven with the pool of hot water. This would create a lot of moisture for the croissant to rise well. The other thing you could do is put a tray covered in plastic wrap in a slightly warm room where you've switched on the heater. But when you do this, make sure that the room isn't exceptionally warm because then the butter will tend to melt. This is something I did this winter when I was making croissant at home. I used to heater and maybe for 15, 20 minutes and then I used to just switch it off. This really resulted in the croissant proving very evenly and much faster than if I would have just left it in maybe 5-10 degrees of weather. This is something which can really help you if you use these two techniques. 17. Chocolate croissant- Complete Process: With this dough, we going to make Chocolate Croissant. We want to just stretch this to about 15 centimeters in height and about 30 centimeters in width. We're going to do the same thing, we're going to trim the edges of this as well. I'm going to be using some dark chocolate, and this is specially made for croissant, but you can use any dark chocolate which you get in this dough. What you do is you just put the chocolate here and then you just measure, and you just make a cut like that. Same thing for the other one. What we do is we just fold it like that. Slightly press it, put another one, and just roll it like that. The measurement is about 7.5-8 centimeters from here and about 15 centimeters here. I'm going to show it again. Just press it like that, and take another chocolate stick, fold it and just roll it along the side. Make sure that this edge is just below here and not underneath. Because it really helps, it derives much better if it's here and not under the side of the croissant. I'm going to be putting these on individual baking sheets as well just to show you the difference when I bake at a different temperature. These ones buff up quite well. This size is a little bit bigger than what we make in commercial bakeries but I really like it because it expands much more. You can see the layers more permanently. If you bake at home the size is perfect and just brush off the excess flour. I'm going to prove this for maybe 2-3 hours and check on this. It's been about four hours. The jockey croissant is nicely proved. You're going to bake this at about 200 degrees for about 15 minutes. You'll see them expanding quite a lot actually. You can see all the layers really clearly, and these look amazing. I'm just going to let them cool down for 20 minutes. 18. Thank you: We finally reached the end of this class and I'm so proud of the progress you've made and the things you've learnt in this class as well. I cant wait to see the pictures of your beautiful croissant and your [inaudible]. Your house is going to smell so amazing when you make these recipes. Also follow me on YouTube and Instagram, and you can also message me on Instagram if you have any questions or doubts, I will definitely get back to you. Thank you again for enrolling in this class and I really hope that you learnt a lot from it. If you like this class, please also check out some of my other classes. If you have any suggestions as well, if you have anything to comment, if you would like to learn different aspects of baking, please message me [inaudible] and I can work on new classes on those topics. Thank you again.