How An F1 Engineer Mastered The Perfect Croissant

24 hours inside Lune Croissanterie learning Kate Reid’s engineering approach to croissant making.
She left Formula 1 engineering to recreate the perfect Parisian croissant experience in Melbourne.
Now she applies the same precision that built race cars to laminated dough.
Can I master techniques that require Formula 1-level accuracy?

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Director, Chef and Host: Andy
Videographer: Ben Hasic
Editor: Caleb Dawkins

What do you get when an F1 engineer applies their precision, performance, and mindset to pastry? Lon has managed to develop what many consider is the best croissant in the world. And today, I’m going to find out if I can keep up in this worldass petissery. I have zero pastry experience under my belt, so this one is definitely going to be a challenge. [Music] Thank you. All right, let’s have a great day. Yes, I like that. Kate Reed, hi. Thank you for having us. Welcome to my place. It’s amazing. So, this dough is for 3 days time. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Give us the 35second intro into who Kate Reed is and how she ended up as one of the best croissant makers in the world. I wasn’t a baker by trade. I had an entire life before came along. I’m actually an aerospace engineer. My first love before quissants was actually Formula 1. Amazing. Got a job with the Williams F1 team working as an aerodynamicist designing the external components of the car to make it go faster and stick to the track. And I’ve had a big flip. Discovered croissants, which I think are kind of the formula one of the pastry world. Applying my engineering brain, but also my love of baking and creating something that makes people feel true joy for the 5 or 10 minutes it takes to eat it. And has that dough changed much in your eight years? No. No. The size has, but the actual dough is still the same one that Kate was using back in our wood. Wow. Yeah. Cool. Don’t it up. Before you put all the ingredients in, we go make sure someone checked it. Sure. Only thing is we need to cross check the cross check the flour and that’s my job. I can get you to mix the yeast for me. Yeah, sure. So, this is yeast. Baker’s yeast. A bit different to the dry active yeast that you get in most supermarkets. We’re eight grams off. So, top up a little bit of yeast and show me. Chef. Yes, chef. Initial. Yes. So, 59 kilos of flour to make this dough. And that was like 8 g off in one of the ingredients and we had to correct it which shows just how precise this dough is. It’s very different to my world. Baking is more akin to a science than it is cooking. I think after today you can probably associate with that. Absolutely. Exact chef. Oh wee. And press start. Yeah. [Music] Happy chef. Happy. Happy. Cool. Still reverse f forward. Forward. Yep. That’s on forward. Um, and then bring it to four minutes. Four minutes. This is a clarified butter. Don’t forget to breathe. So, it’s getting lighter though. So, you want to do that in 5 minutes. I mean, in 1 minute. Sorry. So, not too fast, not too slow. So, aiming that you finish everything in 2.5 minutes. Yeah. Keep going. Chef. Second part will be scraping it again. Sure. Yeah. Well done. Now, you see those segments over there? Yep. That’s where you want to cut the dough. Okay. And put it on the bench. And this is the same dough for all all your lamination products. Yeah. One of the things that we do at Lon that you may have experienced that is very different to most other bakeries, we don’t sprinkle our laminator or the bench with flour. It’s not very flowery for a bakery either, which is cool to see. Most bakeries you go to, you’re like, “Yeah, flour everywhere.” When we weigh up our dough or we like portion out our butter to laminate in, we’re so precise about the the gram of ingredient that we weigh that to randomly sprinkle an unknown amount of flour on the laminator, the belt of the laminator or the bench, that will completely change that perfect ratio that you’ve weighed up. Which is why it’s so crucial that our cube, which is our raw pastry kitchen, maintains its climate. We’re so critical on the temperature and humidity so we don’t have to introduce an unknown amount of an ingredient to ruin that perfect dough that we’ve weighed out on day one. It’s very essential how you roll up will greatly affect how you do the compact step. Pushing out the sides here to emphasize the diamond shape product will be like a P. What you want is you want to create a surface tension. Okay. Bring all those seams into the middle and then essentially rocking back and forth. Okay. And then turn it over. The last thing you want to do is you want to square off the edges here. So quite well like you do a slight pinch. Yeah. Top over. Yeah. Bottom over. Yeah. [Music] Over. Okay. Yeah. Turn on. Yeah. Mostly for Australian bakeries back then, the quasant was a token item that they felt they needed to have on the counter because that’s what bakeries have, but no love and care and attention was being put into the product. So, I thought, well, maybe I can do it. Yeah. Yeah. I love that ambition. Well, it’s also what ignorance is bliss. You know, if you knew how hard it was, maybe you wouldn’t do it. But you just dive blindly into the unknown and you’re like, well, let’s see what happens. Yeah. It feels like making YouTube videos, but I think you’re pretty good at that. So, this is yesterday’s dough. Making sure it’s nice and straight throughout. Pressing again. Sometimes it takes two just to wake it up. Okay. Making sure there’s no air bubbles. So, pushing in the sides this way. Yep. See if I get this part right. Can just be buffer as you’re pushing out the dough. And you want it to kind of taper out. So then when you do your corners, you’re pushing it back in. Cuz they’re coming in like this, aren’t they? Yeah. Are we happy? Yeah. You sure? Happy enough. Happy enough. I feel like that one’s not going to make the cut. Can I get this one right? I’m not so sure. Man, you made that look so easy. How are we feeling? Why yours look so much better? Shocking. It’s fine. It’s You can be not kind. It’s fine. I think you can stretch that part out a little bit just so it’s more in line here. Makes you feel any better. People don’t usually start on this. Yeah, I’m sure. For sure. It’s an improvement, but it’s still not great, is it? It’s called a learning curve. Yeah. It’s also also very aware that I’m really slowing down your production this morning. This is this like muscle memory stuff. How many times do you reckon you’ve done this? 5 and 1/2 years. That’s one one of the better ones. Yeah. Still nice and even. Not as thin on the sides. Yeah. Yeah. For me, the biggest thing that I’ve taken from today is how different what you do here at Lon is to the world that I’ve come from. Yeah, I worked in the past in a very linear fashion. The fact that, you know, we walk into the kitchen, you prep the food, you serve it, you clean down, and then you start again the next day. That’s not how you work here. Things take 3 or 4 days to get ready. I had the opportunity to spend time in this incredible bundy in Paris called Dupan Desi Day. So, sandwiching. So, that’s laminating the butter into the dough. And you’ll have the knockbacks that we did earlier this morning. My first thing is there. really practiced taking your time, taking things slowly, allowing slow fermentation to take place because that really develops complexity of flavor. You can hurry everything. You can do everything quickly, but you won’t end up with a product like that. Yeah. Yeah. So, here at Lon, we make the dough on the first day and it has a short period of time at room temperature where it has its first rise or fermentation, but then we pop it in the fridge and it has a long, slow, cold fermentation for 24 hours. And it’s really like, you know, we’re not doing work on it at that stage. It’s doing work itself to create, I guess, the reaction of the yeast and the flour and the enzymes to develop that like more sourdoughesque quality of the dough. Yeah. Yeah. Your dough bulls affects how your knockbacks are, which then affects how easy this is. Yeah. And then depending on how nice and even your sandwich is depends on how nicely they roll out on the bench on the belt. And then when we do first turns on the bench in a second, you’ll see how whether they’re nice and straight or whether they’re a bit chunky. I definitely didn’t do these ones. Yeah, they scooped in the fridge. Yeah, sure. They’re just set. When the pastry chefs arrive on day two, they pull the dough out of the fridge and then start the process of lamination. So, creating the layers of dough and butter, which is a multi-hour process each morning. I want to make sure it’s all nice and straight the whole way. So, we’re just going to keep trimming until we’ve got butter going all the way through. Folding our dough over. You want to go 2/3 of the way. Y. Can I pick this side up? Y. I go over the dough and then I’ll pull it back and push it all forward. Okay. Your palm, you’re going to go 1 2 3. I do one press in the center. And then you pick up the whole dough. That’s what you’re going to use to measure whether you’ve lined it up nicely or not. The majority of the raw pastry chef’s day is spent turning those batches of dough and butter into the final shaped products that then have a second long fermentation in their final shape overnight in our provers and then are baked the next day. You can retrim or if it’s just a little bit, we’re fine to just kind of it to make it. It’s great when you write the recipes and you try to say it. Happy. Happy. That’s great. I mean, we could do it quicker. Obviously, it’s like taught to new pastry students that it can be done quicker, but I think I learned good things take time and you’ve got to respect and appreciate the the process that the ingredients have to go through even by themselves to get an incredible end product. So, this is the second turn. Make a guideline. Really important that your cuts are really nice and straight. So, then the batch turns out nice and straight. This is the cut. I only spent a month in the bulerie in Paris and my job was making the dough and then when I came back and started Lon I had in my head that I knew how to make croissants but I made the dough which I was super confident about doing and then I realized that I didn’t know what to do next. This one goes to the tree box. We want to bring that in. Yeah. And so I applied an engineering mindset to reverse engineering like the end product that I wanted to create. I’m happy with that. That’s nice and straight. It’s the first time I’ve got a batch so straight for the camera. In the process of doing that, I ended up kind of completely changing the technique of that classic French way of making quissants. But it does mean that we’re still open to innovation on every part of the 3-day process. So, if one of our pastry chefs has a better idea of how to do part of it, they are allowed to present it to us and test it. And if it’s better than the way we make it, it becomes the new way we do it. Amazing. There’s good. Do what your heart says, chef. So, that was the elimination process done, and I didn’t quite think it would be as hard as it was. It’s very technical, really precise, and very focused. Next up, we’re about to go and try and shape a traditional croissant. This is a complete art form and it’s everything that we’ve been working towards throughout the day leads to this point. I don’t know how successful I’m going to be at this. Uh I have a funny feeling I’m not going to be very successful at all, but we’ll give it a go. Not super confident at this one. This is a marking rulers which is custom made. We need pizza wheel and we need a pairing knife and a straight ruler. This is my center mark. Yeah. My first experience of Lon is this building here in the pretty early days. I remember coming here and just being like walking in and being flabbergasted by not only the product but I think the whole experience. you were the one of the first places that I’ve been to that kind of got that that got branding uh that got the space and it and it and it certainly I think took a path in your business that you couldn’t turn back from where you have cues outside your bakery. So the early model of Lon was in a tiny little shop in a bayside suburb called Elwood and it was kind of in the middle of nowhere. It was hard to get to by public transport. We were only open 3 days a week, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Yay. Yay. Yay. City was selling out within 45 minutes of opening and we realized pretty quickly that we can’t keep that up because ultimately people will stop coming because it’s so hard to get them. Left hand, four fingers. We’re wanting to stretch the pastry approximately 85%. Which is aiming for the length of the batch. Um it can rip. Pulling it all the way down nice and even. Yeah. Splitting the neck. Yeah. We would open with typically between 4 and 600 pastries a day. We would open the door at 8:00 a.m. and there was a line of 120 people wrapped up around the block. The first person would often arrive at 2:00 a.m. Yeah, that’s the good trap. Film that one. As you know, normally pastry chefs are in a small room out the back with no windows. You don’t see daylight for the entirety of your shift. But Cam and I were the pastry chefs at the time, and I didn’t want to be stuck in a room out the back. I kind of wanted to be in the thick of the action seeing people enjoy the pastry. Cam’s like, “Oh, you know that scene in Oceans 11 where they build this perfect replica of the bank fault in the middle of a like a warehouse on the docks.” He’s like, “We could do that, but we could build the kitchen in the middle.” Amazing. And so we started to I guess imagine this idea for this glass cube. I guess initially it was the idea the precision and the care and attention to detail that we put into it. You have hot hands. Yeah. I can feel it in the Yeah. Cool down on the bench or some people sometimes have to fill their hands in ice. We built the entire kitchen thinking about like the journey of a quasonant and the experience of a pastry chef making it. If you think about how a chef works and you see someone working in an environment that was created for them like function came first and then form this beautiful form watching people work in the space came after that 10 years on in this space I I don’t think it’s dated I think it’s still as beautiful and timeless and relevant as it was back then. Yeah absolutely if anything I think it’s kind of aged well. So you can take this one and we’ll put it in the prover ready for tomorrow. Okay. Okay. So, we put it in the fourth one along and we just need to cross this guy out cuz he is in there. These are ready. Ready to go. When you touch it, it’s like bouncy. It’s not sticky, not tacky. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, you’re looking that it’s starting to grow out. And then this cut line, so where the pastry is being cut is like uh angling. So, the gradient is getting Yeah. less steep or the camber in Formula 1 terms. Yeah, sure. We’ll go with that. My childhood dream was to work in Formula 1 designing the cars. I managed to achieve my dream at the age of 23. Do you feel the therapeuticness coming in? I do. I could do this for hours. It’s an incredibly young age to have that thought and that maturity to say actually I’ve worked for, you know, the last 15, 20 years to get to this goal and it’s not for me. When I finally did achieve that job, I had a big dream about what that would look like built up in my mind. I had high expectations. I had worked so hard to get there. as you said for like over a decade with this singular dream. I developed depression and then an eating disorder as a way to cope with this disillusionment of my dream and I got very very ill. When you do suffer from an eating disorder, all you can think about is food. You’re starving your body so it’s just sending signals to your brain all day to eat and you dream about eating the things that you love eating. And my mom was an amazing home baker and always made sure the cupboards were full of something delicious for us when we were growing up. It’s a really awkward oven. Yes. So stressful. I gained, I guess, some feeling of hope and fulfillment through baking at home after work and like just going through that methodical process of following the the recipe, weighing things perfectly, following the methodology and then pulling out of the oven something beautiful and delicious that made people happy. Yeah. Incredible. Cruffins were invented by Kate. Fun fact. There you go. She’s the inventor. She’s the inventor of the cruffin. This product, the the cruffin. The cruffin. It’s that was your your invention that is now in every bakery in the world almost. When we roll out a batch of pastry, we trim off the top and bottom of the batch because as it gets towards the outside, the lamination kind of pieces out so it’s less perfect. I’m definitely not a pastry chef. And we want to provide like the the quason, the panos shakala from the perfect pastry in the middle. And one day I’m like, I feel like I’m throwing out good pastry here. Like we could be using it for something. It’s still all the same ingredients. But now we make so many that we actually just run bashes across it. I had a muffin tin under the bench and I just knotted it up, you know, six knots of pastry and proved them. And the next morning when I woke up there were these kind of perfect flowers. Like they look wonderful. Yeah. What ones are we pulling off? So this guy for sure. This one, this one, this one, this one, this one. It’s actually very difficult. Yeah. you you show us how it’s done. I can’t be fair, right? Yeah, absolutely. They’re wonderful because they allow quissant pastry to be used as a vehicle for other flavors and textures and allows our pastry chefs to get really creative with, you know, a different experience with quasant pastry. Cruffins. Cruffins. Nice. Done. What’s your What’s your favorite pastry? If I had to pick one to eat for the rest of my life, I would pick the traditional. I’ve got to love all the children. I’ve got a really big soft spot for the morning bun. That was inspired by Liz Puit’s tartine morning bun. One of them fresh out of the oven is a thing of beauty. What’s your favorite pastry? Queen Aman, which is actually No hesitation either. I like that. I’ve had 8 years to think about it. I could eat a warm Queen Aman every day for the rest of my life and I would be a happy lady. Queen Aman, which it’s a pretty clear star favorite. Someone’s got extra butter, extra sugar. Oh, aggressive. Yeah. Someone once described it to me as sand at the beach. Okay. Uh there’s so much sugar it almost makes it hard to Before I started Lon, I don’t think anyone in Australia, unless you were from Britany, you didn’t know what a Queen Aman was. I couldn’t pronounce it. I built up the courage one day to order a kuigan aman. And the French woman behind the counter laughed at me. Yeah. And here you go. Or probably scoffed at me. Let’s be honest. The spiral needs to be going the same way. And I had it and it was transformative. like it was croissant pastry, but like I’d never had it before. And then I came back and I thought, well, maybe I’ll try to make a quin aran. And it’s very, very hard to make. And now they’re known all over the world. Yeah, they’re everywhere. I mean, I I love it because of the it feels like the perfect balance. Like it’s not too sweet. A little bit of salt at the end. Is there sugar in there as well? Lots of butter, lots of sugar like you would with the Souflame mold. Y except you don’t need to paint it upwards. Ka’s phase one complete. Look, Andy’s doing work. Yeah, Andy’s important. That’s Queen of M. My number one favorite pastry of all time. Slightly salty, slightly sweet, delicious. Yeah. Right. And you could just keep going. Yeah. You were famously never did wholesale and still largely you don’t do wholesale. Well, we only do one now. One account. So, the amazing Joe Hogan who owns Mecca. Yes. She reached out to me when I was in Italy and said Mecca Mecca on Burk Street and we’re going to have Cafe Mecca and your Joe. Like so many of her values intersect and align with Loons and my own. It felt like a really natural fit to us. Getting the hang of it? Uh no. Like we bake fresh all throughout the day. Like we don’t just do one or two bakes. Like every moment there’s quissants in the oven going and once you’ve eaten a quissant that’s 15 minutes out of the oven and you know the shell’s crunchy but then the layers inside are still like soft and a bit tacky and buttery and there’s puff of steam. You don’t want to eat a quissant any other way. For us to be able to serve it fresh out of the oven, the Lon experience, being able to watch the pastries being made, it’s as you said, it’s not just coming in and buying a quason, it’s an experience. And I think more of a rather than just getting a Yeah, I agree. Five stores now. Seven. Seven stores now. Seven. Three in Melbourne. Two in Sydney, two in Brisbane. Two in Brisbane. And we’ve got a couple more exciting ones on the slate. Amazing. Is this one of your top sellers? The almond. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. In Brisbane, it is the top seller. Right. This might be difficult, but just try. Just try. And then when it’s lined up and tight, I hold my pinky to the end of the franch line and then lay it down. And I don’t let go of the tension. And then as my pinky supports the bottom and this creates like an L shape here. I tap it in to the French cuz you really want it to stick all the way down to the base of the croissant. Okay. Easy, easy, easy, easy. What’s the worst that can happen? How many years has a shop? Uh, 25. You got this? Yeah. Two crystals. You need to shake. Shake it more. Shake it. Shake it. I like that. That looks good. Yes. I’m I’m nervous to look. Remember, it can be fixed. Yeah. I don’t think that can be fixed. I always thought it was just done with like tweezers. Mhm. That might be easier than you. Yeah. We’ll just pretend. Just do the edit and Yeah. be the hardest thing you do in your my life. That’s much better than your first one. Yeah. I hope so. Can’t really get much worse than that. So, the next one we It’s definitely not as good as yours. Okay. Next one we try, we try not to squish it down. Yeah, I did not. And then you still have a close tie to the Melbourne Grand Prix. Absolutely. You guys have a stall there every year. do. Next year it’ll be third year running. And that does feel like such a wonderful full circle moment for me. Pretend that I’m putting this one down. Exactly. Go, go, go. Wow. I’ll pretend I put this one down. Oh my god. Oh my god. It’s still a sport that I love. And maybe I love it even more than before I worked in it because I now have this deep appreciation for all those people working back in the UK who don’t get to travel to the races and they’re, you know, working huge amounts of hours behind a computer to make the spectacle that we get to enjoy come to life. All the F1 teams love it. So many of them order pastries from us over the weekend and yeah, it feels like maybe that was how I was meant to work in Formula 1 after. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. At least they have the same direction. How did I do? Perfect. Very rustic. Very rustic. How long have you been working here? Uh, almost three years. Oh, wow. Yeah. How’s your executive chef? The best. So funny. Just join our lives. This is what she demands. But I don’t stop her. Are you still a Williams girl or you? I am. It’s hard not to be. I think, you know, they were the team that I dreamt of working for and I was actually lucky enough to be there when Frank Williams was still very active. Pretty good. It’s pretty special. I mean, literally one of the icons of the sport. He’s so steeped in history and like the success that his team’s had. So, what do you think about Oscar Pastri? Love Oscar. He is one of the nicest, most down to earth people. We’re due world champions. I think so, too. And he’d be wonderful. And he’s also got a great surname. I mean, it’s very close to pastry. I could sit here and talk about Formula 1 all afternoon. But um that’s this has been amazing. Congratulations on your success. Thank you. Thanks for coming to Lon and seeing what we do. It’s been really like really momentous for us as well. It meant a lot. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Nice to meet you. Yeah, likewise. Go watch your Formula One roast. Yeah, love it. Thanks, Andy. So, that’s Lon, an incredible bakery that goes to show you that both precision and creativity can live next to each other in a beautiful harmony. I absolutely love what these guys do here. And if you’re ever in Melbourne, Brisbane or Sydney, you should definitely check them out.