How the Best Croissants in NYC are Made | Made to Order | Bon Appétit

World-famous pastry chef Dominique Ansel (creator of the Cronut) joins Bon Appétit to demonstrate how to make the perfect croissant at his NYC bakery. Learn every step, from mixing and fermenting the dough to laminating with French butter, shaping, proofing, and baking for that signature flaky, golden crust and moist honeycomb interior.

Learn to make buttery, flaky croissants at home with world-renowned pastry chef Dominique Ansel’s step-by-step recipe—a perfect foundation for success. https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/homemade-croissants

00:00 Intro
00:45 Making Dough
04:38 Shaping and Degassing
06:04 Lamination
10:02 Cutting and Shaping
13:04 Proof
14:34 Bake

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I’m Dominican, pastry chef and owner of Dominicans bakery. And today I’m going to show you my perfect basel here in New York City. We have three bakeries and we also have two bakeries in Las Vegas Palace and the Paris Hotel. I eat a quason like you’re tasting wine. You’re going to see this golden beautiful crust. All these layers that are slightly separating on the side. It has to be moist. He has to be still kinder in the center with nice crunchy flake on the outside. I look at the cross-section which we call the honeycomb. The honeycomb should be this little air pocket within the layers of the quason which tells you that the quason is beautifully made. The very first thing we do for making a quason it’s mixing the dough. If you are making at home few tips and tools that you need are think for sure using digital scales. I measure everything in metrics because it’s a lot more precise. Digital thermometer as well is very important. Won’t try to keep things as cold as possible as the mixing process. The friction will add rise the temperature within the dough. The flour is probably one of the most important ingredient in aquasol. This is a flour from France from Leula and the pari a flour maker in France. The quality of the wheat, the quality of the soil. This is one of the most crucial ingredient into making a quason because you get something that is the quality and the specificity of making a quason that will hold the gluten that will absorb the the water properly and give you like a very specific and unique texture that you cannot get with any other flour. The lan we use it’s for both flavor and fermentation. It helps with the characteristic of the taste of the quason. makes it like very unique and special. The deep yeasty flavor and it’s also leing agent so it helps like making the quant puffy and light. This is a mixer that’s designed for dough specifically. So the only the bowl and the hood are moving. We’re going to put all our dry ingredients within the mixer. Then we’re going to add all of the honey to give the some food but also for the flavors and texture. Without the honey, the texture of the dough is different. Then we’re going to add our butter here. We use easy smear butter. High quality ingredients and that makes a huge difference within the quality of the quason you get. Then we’re going to add the milk. Add the extra protein. Makes a quason just a little bit richer. Eggs. We have our yeast that’s been dissolved with room temperature water. Going to add this to the side here. We add the water at the end. We’re going to close the gate. We’re going to start mixing. The motion and the friction of the hook within the dough is going to make everything warmer. So the longer you mix, the warmer it’s going to get. Our sweet spot here is between 22 and 24. It cannot be above 30°. You will start killing the fermentation, killing the lava and the yeast. Making dough in a small stand mixer is not ideal even with a hook because you have a lot of friction. Often times that is too hot and not elastic enough. What I find like using this type of mixer that is designed for dough, it makes the dough more combined mix faster with more elasticity without overheating the dough. The snap should be strong. Should be like a lot of resistance. Right now, I can grab it and pull it easily. So, I’m going to mix for another minute. We use the same loan, the same recipe, the same ingredients every single day. There’s so many variables that makes it too tricky to give too many details on what we’re looking for. winter it will change the summer will change depending on the flour. Yeah, the difference is like already like much much bigger. So I can feel just after like minute of mixing the dough is a lot more elasticity but we’re going to stretch it very very thin in center to see how much elasticity we have here. You should be able to do this to the dough and for the dough to bounce back without breaking. And you see like thin like paper right now. And we’re activating the fermentation between 22 and 24 Celsius. That’s a sweet spot. Still got it. If we get the dough after mixing between 22 and 24, we’re activating that fermentation. So the dough is going to start like puffing up and rising. If for some reason it’s a little too cold, you can mix a little bit more. If it’s too hot, unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do. You have to start the whole process again. So always better to have a dough that’s a little bit too cold. The bulk fermentation is happening now. What we’re looking for is a dough that’s going to double the size. That’s going to be a good indication of the fermentation has started. [Music] Now, we’re going to shape the dough. So, what I like to do here, two hands, we’re going to give a nice ball shape. We’re going to keep it nice and tight. You can see just after a few minutes sitting on the counter, the texture change already. The dough is already like changing, evolving. So that all the flour, all the gluten content is going to absorb the moisture within the dough and it’s going to feel very stretchy, very bouncy. What I like to do is to cut the dough on top here. You do a cross right in the middle. I’m predefining the shape of the dough. I want something square and rectangle to incorporate the butter. And I’m going to put this on a sheet tray with a plastic cover. We’ll just wrap it up. We’re going to leave a little bit of room. Now we’re just going to wait. The dough has been sitting out for about two hours. As you see, like it’s light and puffy right now. So, with the plastic on top, just going to press the dough down to really remove all that gas, all these bubbles, and you can feel the gas getting chested out of the dough. If you don’t do this, what’s going to happen is that the dough is going to over ferment. All that fermentation that you need before the baking eventually turns sour. You’re not going to have the result you’re looking for. the volume is not going to be there and the flavor is going to be different. I just finished the first degass. We’re going to put this in the fridge for 1 hour. I’m going to do the second degass and then we’re going to start the lamination. [Music] Process is very important as we’re going to give all the layers to the quasant. Here have my butter that’s squared out and the particularity of this butter which is one of the most important thing is that this butter is French butter. It is very very very very flexible. As you can see, you can bend it and it won’t break. So this butter has very low water content and butter is going to give all that texture, beautiful texture of the croissant. If it’s too cold, you won’t be able to bend it. You want cool but very flexible. And you want to have your dough as cool as possible because we’re going to give the fold. And as we’re doing this, the dough is going to get warmer and warmer. I’m going to have to walk a little bit fast here. We’re going to place our butter about halfway through the dough. So, I’m going to cut my dough in half right here. You want everything to match up and pile up as perfectly as possible. I’m going to flip my dough. Bring the dough to the edge of the butter. And you see I put this on parchment paper so it doesn’t stick. We’re starting uh doing the first fold. It’s going to give us the that light puffy texture. For this, I use a rolling pin. The layers within a quason is one of the most important part of making a beautiful quason. It has to be flaky. It has to be separated. It cannot be too buttery. It cannot be too dry either. It’s going to take a bit of time. But I’m going to roll this very gently, as delicately as possible. So, even for home, this will be a large batch. I flip it because I want to make sure that I evenly put pressure on the butter and the dough. I’m trying to make sure I keep that layer of butter sandwich between the dough and as consistent as possible. If it gets too warm, we should definitely like put this in the fridge. It takes a little bit of time. Takes a little bit of stren to roll that dough. You don’t have to make that big of a batch either, but I won’t show you the process of like making by hand, which is like not not the easiest and not ideal either, but which is still possible to do at home. There’s many different ways of doing this. People can wrap the dough around the butter and push it in, do like a pocket. I like to do it this way because the butter goes as close as possible to the edge and you don’t have an excess of dough on the side. I usually work my dough around 0 to 4°C and I walk the butter around 18. We’re going to fold the dough one/ird of the way like this. And over here you can see we started with two piece of dough, one piece of butter and now we’re like multiplying the layers. So, there’s like three layers here. Plus three, plus three. There’s nine layers. We’re going to chill it for about an hour. And then we’ll give another fold. Here’s a dough we just folded. You see it’s a little puffy, a little bit more round, a little like less even. And this is the dough that went through the sheet with a single fold double fold. A dough sheetter. It’s a machine that has two cylinders where we can adjust the height of the cylinders. So, essentially pass your dough through it and that makes it like thinner and thinner. You can automate it and you can do this very quickly and have a very consistent result. Here we’ve given our single fold double fold. The dough has chilled for another hour and now we’re going to do process the final sheeting. So we’re going to go to 4 mm which is the thickness of aquas. We’re going to make it wide enough so we can fold it in half and actually cut those triangles. So just a light dust of flour right here. And the machine is programmed so it will know like which thickness to go. So, as you see, as the cylinders are going down, the dough is going to get thinner and thinner. You can have too many layers in in the case like you stretching the dough way too much and you have a dough that will like tear apart a little bit. You can have too little layers if you don’t give the right folds and it won’t be as as light and as puffy. If you do is tearing at this point, there’s nothing else you can do. You have to start the process from the beginning. There’s no way save it. [Music] Once our is off the shear, what we do first is to relax the dough. We stretch it so much one way. Want to make sure it doesn’t retract. So, we’re going to relax the dough by just pulling the sides like this. We have we have a lot of layers here. A single fold and a double fold. So, like probably thousands of layers right here. So, once I have relaxed my dough here, just going to fold it in half. exhaust a light pressure on the dough just to mark the middle and I’m going to cut it with a sharp blade. I’m going to cut it right here. This is called a bicycle just to mark out the dough. So, I’m going to push it to 9 cm, 9 and 1/2. You will see thousands of different ways of making different sizes. I like mine to be like 9 and 1/2 by uh 26 27. And then we go all the way down. We mark it on the bottom as well. So, now I’m going to take my blade and my ruler. I’m going to cut through to make my triangles. I use a razor blade because it doesn’t press and crush the layers. It really like cuts them through. What I want you to see here is all these layers, hundreds and hundreds of layers of butter and dough. They are overlapping each other. And you can see the dough and the butter are like distinct lines. And that’s what makes like a beautiful quason. It’s because all those lines. So they like make those layers and make this very light texture. You want to do this as quick as possible while it’s on the counter so the dough doesn’t get too soft. It’s important to like rest at this stage because we’ve stretched the dough so much and we want the dough to relax a little bit before we give the final shaping so we don’t lose that definition of the quason. So, we’re done with cutting quason. Now, we’re going to put them in the fridge for about an hour to rest. Just cut our quason. And uh the the fun part, I would say the part everyone loves is rolling the quason. For this, we just push at the top of the quason and we roll it down straight to make sure it’s symmetrical. And I push it down slightly. Remember, we those quason to 4 mm. And we see those layers. We can really uh see the definition of the butter and the dough still. And this will appear when we actually bake those quason. I like to leave the tip of my quason just tuck slightly under and not too far in. So you want something as puffy, as light, as irated as possible. If the tail of the quason is stuck in, it’s going to keep everything tight and prevent it from developing. Once we shape our quason, two things that are important here. I slightly press it down so to prevent from the dough to rolling as it’s like poofing and baking. Also leave enough space within the quason. The volume is going to double to triple. So I want to make sure there’s space in between so they don’t touch each other. and also to make sure that the air circulate while baking throughout the tray in between the quasant. So you have a nice development of the quason. So those are ready and ready to go in proofer. They’re rolled. We at 28° C with 80 to 85% humidity. So very important is when we uh really like push the fermentation. If you go over 28 Celsius, uh you might take the risk of melting the butter. So you don’t want to be too hot. And that humidity inside the is very important to help keeping the dough moist so it doesn’t dry out and helping develop as well without too much heat. This is our proofer. It’s just a box with some heat and humidity. They’re going to be in here for about 2 hours. You know the east is really going to get to work start activating within the quason and park. These have been proofing for about an hour and a half. They’re ready to bake. So the test the jiggle. You want to shake it a little bit and see that jiggle. You see the quason is like puffy, light, irrated. And we’re gonna put egg wash on top. Ideally, I like to do is to stay within the top layer and not go to the side. So I’m going to brush lightly right here. You’re avoiding the sides because you want that beautiful layer separation on the side and you want to see like flaking off and like and like puffing up. So if you were to put egg wash, you will kind of like stick and attach those layers together. In our egg wash, we put uh some whole eggs, a little bit of cream, and a tiny bit of salt. This is only to make the quason shiny and golden. This is now proofed egg wash. Next step is baking. [Music] These are m oven. They are Germans ovens actually. Uh some of the best on market for for baking. Uh love the precision and the consistency of it. We’re going really hot, 190 for about 8 to 9 minutes. We want nice crispy flaky layers on side. We want these layers to puff up. So, we want to go really hot. If you have to bake at a lower temperature, you’ll form like a crust outside of your vinri and it will be like very unpleasant to eat. So, you want like nice like crunchy bite and keep it that moisture in the center is very important. So, you don’t go really hot. Actually, what’s happening here is that those layers of butter and dough with elasticity and the steam inside puffing, rising up and developing those layers and the texture of the quasa. All right, we can we can talk. We can talk, but eventually we have to eat this. You know, the ultimate experience. What makes it special here for me? That golden car camelized like shiny crust on the outside. You see all those layers, those flaky layers, we preserve them. It’s light. Smells good. Don’t use a regular knife zed knife to really cut through those layers. You’re going to hear that flex. You’re going to see those little flex like falling apart which is normal. And then I’ll look inside the croissant. So here our cross-section the honeycomb defines like the fermentation the layers and everything we’ve been building. So you can see this right here has a little tight because I’m very picky. would have poofed a little bit longer, but overall like a pretty good puss. That thin white line right under the crust. I call it the the lining which should be like almost inexistent. Should be like a super thin like paper like white line. This gets thicker. Your oven is not hot enough. It’s going to get thicker and thicker. You’re going to slowly like dry the quason instead of cooking it like very quickly. That will make your quasan like very unpleasant. And of course, we’re going to take a bite. So, cheers to our beautiful Kasa. Happy