Croissants

A genuine, buttery, hand-laminated croissant is an increasingly rare pleasure, but not one beyond the enthusiastic home baker. August Zang’s Viennese bakery brought the crescent-shaped Austrian kipferl to Paris in the late 1830s, and while this is generally accepted as the ancestor of the croissant, the first written recipe to create this butter-laminated dough apparently dates to just the early 20th century. Make sure you use high fat content butter, ideally 84%.