How To Make Croissants At Home

The perfect croissant is buttery, flaky, fluffy, and irresistible. With a few simple ingredients and patience, you can make the most delicious croissants at home.

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This much butter can only mean one thing. We're making croissants. We'll begin by making our base dough, which starts with some all-purpose flour, then some bread flour, sugar, yeast, and some salt. Before adding my dough hook, I'll give it a quick whisk to make sure all is fully combined. Then I'll add it on and pour in some room temperature milk and water. And then we'll mix on medium low until we get a tight ball, which should take about 5 minutes. While it mixes, I'm going to clean up my station because we want to clean as we go or your kitchen will be a disaster. The next step is to scrape it cleanly off the dough hook and then cover the bowl with a damp kitchen towel. And now just let this relax for about 10 minutes. Once your 10 minutes has gone by, go ahead and remove the cover and we'll add in some cubed French butter. Reattach the dough hook. And again, we'll mix on medium low. This time, we'll mix for about 5 to 8 minutes. And we're going for a silky and elastic dough, not sticky. It may look a bit messy at first with all those butter chunks streaking through the dough, but if you give it a few minutes, it'll come together. Woo, my mixer's hot. That's another important note here. It's a lot of work for your mixer. At this stage, we'll take the bowl off the mixer and once again, pull the dough off the dough hook. And then we'll lift up our dough, form it gently to put it into somewhat of a ball shape, and then place it right back into the bowl, seamside down. And then we're going to cover this up and rest it for 4 to 12 hours in the fridge. But I've already made a swap so we don't have to wait. The next step is to cut a cross into the top, which will help us shape the dough into a natural square shape later on once it's risen. And now we'll cover and let it rise at room temperature for about an hour or until it's grown one and a half times its size. If you're brave enough to be making this and your dough looks like this right now, you're doing a great job. Next, we're going to punch right into the middle of that X we made earlier. Your dough should deflate like this, at which point you can shift it aside. Cover your work surface with plastic wrap, all running in the same direction. And then we'll gently and carefully pull the dough away from its bowl from the sides. And once loose, lift it right to the center of that plastic wrap. I'm going to use a ruler for a guide during this part. I'm going to push away and pull back on these tabs to create a nice even square. Maybe more like a rounded square. Once it looks nice and even, we'll fold in the plastic wrap from the bottom and the top. Then same thing on either side nice and tight. And then we flip and use our rolling pin to roll that dough into those corners. The goal here is to create a perfect square with four sharp corners. Carefully pick this up and rest it on a flat surface in your freezer for 25 minutes. While that's in the freezer, I'll draw an 8 in square in the center of a piece of parchment paper. Precision is very important here because technically the better the square, the better your croissants. And then it's time to bring in the butter. We want a very precise amount of butter here. All the specific measurements are on my website, which is in the link in the description below, along with the whole recipe, of course. Once you've measured your butter, flip over your parchment. That's so we don't get any ink into our butter. And then cut your butter into nice even rectangles so that you can arrange it all around that square and try to fill out the space. It can be a little bit tricky to spread this out evenly, but do your best. And remember that the better you do now, the easier your next step will be. We'll cover the top of this with some more parchment paper. And as a start, I'm going to get in there with the ruler and really push this up against the edges to make four nice corners. And now, most importantly, bring in your rolling pin and roll or push to try to get the butter as even as possible. Once it all looks connected, you should also flip this over. And that way, you can see exactly where it's fitting in the square. And if it ever pushes out of the sides like this, you can always push it back again. Although, try to do this in a somewhat timely manner cuz it is butter and butter melts. Once we get a nice square shape like this, go ahead and flip again, orient it like this in front of yourself. And we're going to wrap our butter as if it were a present. First, we'll fold over the top and give it a crease. Then, same thing on the bottom. Then, we'll fold in at the corners. And then, fold that whole part in like this. And then, we'll repeat on the other side. You can see now why I said this was a bit like wrapping a gift. And now, one more time, flip it back over. And while this goes into the fridge to harden, we'll grab our dough from the freezer. Unwrap your dough carefully and then give your work surface a light dusting of flour. And if you like, you could save this off to the side. I'll do the tiniest dusting of flour on the top as well as on my rolling pin. And now we need to keep this 8 in wide just like the butter, but roll it out to 16 in long. My strategy here is to roll it forward with nice even pressure. Then push in the sides and repeat. The whole time we want to focus on keeping those sharp edges that we work so hard to make. Once you start to feel more comfortable, you can even pick the dough up like this and start stretching this way. as long as you're making sure to maintain that even thickness throughout. What we've made here is a very durable dough. Don't be afraid to really work it. The longer it gets, the more and more helpful the ruler is going to become to keep it nice and straight. Eventually, when our dough looks like this, we are ready to add on our butter. Now that our butter is nice and firm, we can unwrap it. And as long as the butter feels like it's slightly warmer than the dough, we can go ahead and place it right into the center. What we're doing now is making what's called our butter packet. Fold over the top and bottom and pinch until fully sealed. And then do that exact same thing down both sides. Then without breaking the butter, lift it up, dust off any excess flour from the bottom, and then lay it down with the line in the center facing you like this. And now this part here can be difficult. Our goal is to roll out the butter and the dough, two completely different textures at the exact same time. And to do that, we're going to do a combination of tapping the dough like this and then rolling, but almost sort of massaging the dough and butter like this. You also want to spin it quite often and make sure you have just enough flour under it that it doesn't stick. But don't put too much because it'll ruin the flakiness of your croissant. I say this is more like massaging than rolling because if you've ever gotten a massage, you can think of the dough like your skin and the butter underneath like your muscles. They're a little bit tougher, but if you work them long enough, you'll soften them out. This takes a little while, but be patient and repeat this process and slowly and eventually your dough will stretch. In the end, this whole process of rolling took me about 15 or 20 minutes. Once it reaches our desired length of 24 in, the final step here is to trim off any wavy edges so it looks nice and sharp and square again. And now we're going to do what's called our first lamination, or as I like to say, we're going to fold it up like a book. When we do this, we leave a little space like this in the middle. And then here's where it really looks like a book. We fold the whole thing over itself. All those layers right there are the start of building those beautifully flaky layers that we see in a croissant. The reason I said you could save this is because we're now going to lay our dough back in here and then fold it up getting it as tight as possible like this. And then we take it to the freezer for 20 minutes and the fridge for an hour after. And after all that, you'll be left with this. It kind of looks exactly the same. Once again, lightly dust your work surface with flour. And now we're going to do that same process of tapping down the dough and butter, except this time there might be a few air bubbles that we need to pop. I find this second rolling process to be much easier than the first, especially because the time in the refrigerator made it easier to roll out. Here, our goal is to get a nice long rectangle that measures 3/8 of an inch thick. This next fold we do is called the letter fold, and it's to add even more layers. If your plastic wrap has started looking a little tired like mine, grab some more. And once again, wrap it up nice and tight. Still keeping this in that nice rectangular shape with those sharp edges. And now, same thing as last time. This goes in the freezer for 20 minutes and the fridge for an hour. And finally, it's time for the final roll. Same thing again. Little flour on the board, then open your dough and down it goes. The goal now is to roll it to one big evenly thick rectangle that's 14 by 17 in long using the very same tapping and rolling method as before. I find that at this stage, the rolling works better than the tapping, especially cuz we don't have to be so nervous about our butter breaking. This entire process has been to create layers, and now we have 36 layers of butter and dough here. As I cover this in plastic wrap again, I'll tell you the good news and bad news. The good news is that we're finished folding. But the bad news, this now has to go in the freezer for 20 minutes and then the fridge for at least 8 hours, if not overnight. I'm so sorry. Once our dough is finished resting overnight, we can move on to shape our croissants. And to do that, we need to prepare our oven for what's called proofing. This process will make sure that those 36 layers we just worked so hard making will puff up instead of melt away when we bake. And all we do is bring some water to a simmer and then place it at the bottom of our oven with the oven turned off. What we're basically doing is creating a nice humid day inside our oven. 5 hours before we want to eat our croissants, we'll take our dough out, unwrap it. You can tell I'm starting to get hangry since I'm just ripping it now. And then we'll trim it down so it measures 14 by 16 in long. And once we've got a nice perfect rectangle, we're going to measure it and split this into four smaller rectangles, each measuring 4 in across. Then with each of those rectangles, we're going to cut them diagonally across from corner to corner. Still trying to keep things as perfect as we can. And we're done with the ruler. To roll our croissants, we'll pick the base of each triangle up and stretch it out a little bit like this. And then pull and stretch the whole piece of dough all the way to the tip. And now we roll. I've been waiting to do this for a long, long time. Carefully pick this up now and lay it seamside down on a silicone mat or parchment paper lined baking sheet. I think rolling them up like this is my second favorite part of making croissants behind eating them because I'll be honest, there are a lot of other parts of making these that are not that fun. Because these will expand quite a bit, I'm only going to put four croissants per baking sheet. And now, after adding a light layer of plastic wrap, we're going to place them in our oven to proof for two to two and a half hours. And with the power of movie magic, we don't even have to wait. I'll carefully peel away my plastic wrap and shift this off to the side while I do the finishing step here, making an egg wash that consists of one egg yolk plus a little bit of heavy cream. Mix this together until uniform. And our final step before baking is to paint just the tops of the croissants, not those sides where we see all those layers. This is the moment where you channel your inner Picasso. And I'm even going to use a real tiny paintbrush. Can we maybe play a little classical music for this part here? I feel like that would be nice. These will now go into the oven at 350 Fahrenheit for 35 minutes or until golden brown. And while they bake, I'll keep my fingers crossed. My oven door is pretty dirty today, so I'm just going to show you a random video of another croissant baking instead. Pretty cool, isn't it? Homemade croissants. Look at these. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but the first thing that comes to mind after all the time we just spent baking these is I just want to squeeze one. Before doing anything with these, it's important to let them cool down for 20 minutes. And when you think about it, you always see bakeries selling them at room temperature. So, we're going to do the same. But after those 20 minutes and all the other time we spent making these, we are left with this. And check out that cross-section that we got here. That is how you make a croissant at home. I'm going to go to sleep now.