The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food—Baking Croissants at the New Year with Kool and the Gang

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My croissants (definitely not made by AI, although you can probably tell that...)

‘La-min-ate good times, come on! ... It’s a lamination’ – did you know these were the original lyrics of the hit song by Kool and the Gang? ... No? 

That’s because they weren’t, but doesn’t it sound great? If you’re like me, once you’ve replaced ‘celebrate’ with ‘laminate’ you’ll never be able to listen to that song in the same way again without thinking of a pain au chocolat. At the same time, good times should be laminated – I mean what better way is there to mark a special occasion or milestone than with sheets of buttery, flaky pastry which has taken someone hours to make? So, for me, especially since I’ve learned to make croissant dough, the words laminate and celebrate have become interchangeable. 

This year, on New Year’s Eve I started making croissant dough. I just had a hankering for something buttery and luxurious because, you know, it’s not as if Christmas has any food like that, right? It wasn’t the first time I’d made them, but it’d been so long that I may as well have been learning from scratch. Labour intensive as they are, they’re just not the kind of thing I readily knock up at the weekend. 

I followed the recipe by Richard Bertinet from his excellent book Crust, although I did find the size of the croissant his yields a little on the stingy side – what can I say: I like big croissants and I cannot lie. 

Process Over Product

When I’ve told people that I sometimes make my own croissants, I’ve been met with the reaction of ‘why bother? All that time and effort for something that’s probably not going to be as nice as getting from Lidl for around about a quid? I can see their point of view, as why would we make anything ourselves now that we can buy it in a heartbeat, probably online and probably get it delivered to our door within the hour? Well, it might not surprise you to hear that, as with most of the things I do in the kitchen, it’s as much about the process and the patience as the final product. Indeed, 9/10 once I’ve got to the end of one or t’other pain-staking cooking processes I’m either disappointed or dissatisfied with the outcome, or both. In many ways, and particularly in baking, which requires an endless amount of patience, there are striking similarities between cooking and writing, in terms of going through a process only to learn at the end of it that you have to begin all over again. Aside from sourdough bread, which I intend to write about later, making laminated dough for croissants is the definition of a labour of love. I mean, I could just go and buy a croissant from my local Co-op and it was be decent – even if a little Ultra processed –, maybe even on a good day a little better than decent, with a shattery shell and pillowy, stretchy interior, but where’s the fun in that? Where’s the process in that? Where’s the skill, the education in that? The value of teaching oneself how to bake such viennoiserie as croissants has a value in itself which surpasses the simple pleasure of eating the final made thing. 

Croissants in Crossgar?

Let me be clear: Crossgar was not renowned for croissants, in fact I can’t ever remember having them as a child – probably on account of them being perceived as a bit too foreign. The sweet treats we grew up with were more from the cake family (jam and coconut sponges, scones, coffee cakes, wheaten biscuits), than the vienoisserie family. No, I really can’t remember my first encounter with a croissant. However, I now consider them to be the benchmark of any bakery, i.e. if they can make a good croissant, I’m in. Suffice to say The Home Bakery on the main street in Crossgar did not stock them. 

The Fascination of What’s Difficult

This is a phrase from the eponymous poem by W. B. Yeats, about the art of poetry, and how what draws the poet back is at the most an obsessive fascination for perfection, or at the least a sense of using words to make some kind of order out of the chaos of existence. Derek Mahon, another Irish poet wrote about the poet’s ‘wretched rage for order’, and I can’t help but feel that baking, like poetry, is about accomplishing a kind of order. And I suppose if I were to choose one baked good out of all baked goods that represents orderliness, with its thin alternating layers of dough and butter (achieved through a technique known as lamination) and its highly recognisable form, it’s got to be the croissant. Inspired by the Austrian, breadier kipferl, which August Zang when he opened his now-famous Boulangerie Viennoise in Paris around 1838, the present day recipe, featuring the characteristic lamination technique which results in layers of buttery pastry, for the croissant (which literally means crescent in English) is said to originate appeared about 1905.

Puff Pastry Pitfalls

As with all baking, there are many pitfalls for a croissant – now there’s a sentence you won’t hear every day, unless of course you’re a professional veinoisseur, in which case you may well have it tattooed on the back of your hand. But seriously, you’ve got the recipe for a start and how much egg to add, proving times, fridge proving or ambient proving, how many layers to build into your dough, temperature of the oven, size of the croissant, should you wash them with egg or just the yolk or wash them at all, duration of baking, and I could go on. It’s only when you’ve tried to make your own croissants that you learn how difficult it is to get it right. The chances are you’ll make something passable and edible, but to get it artisanal requires a bit of practice. And once you are able to do this, there’s then the challenge of repeating your success, to make sure your last batch wasn’t just a fluke. So, in case you’re still wondering what I’m getting at: making croissants is well hard!

10 Things to Look For in a Croissant

1. Golden brown outside – it will be shiny if they've used egg wash on it, but it doesn’t have to be, and if anything the egg wash can make it taste overly, well, eggy. 

2. Layers, loads of them, filled with air. When you cut down the middle of a croissant and look at its cross section you should be able to see many clearly definable white, papery thin layers.

3. Stretch: When you pull the end of a croissant away from itself, if it’s been proved properly and the dough has been worked correctly, it should stretch nicely before breaking. This means there’s plenty of elasticity in the dough, which in turn gives it great body, and, as they’ve started to say nowadays, ‘mouth-feel’... urgh. 

4. It should be light as a feather to pick up. A croissant, if proven for long enough and if the dough has been mixed and kneaded just right, should be full of air.

5. A deep golden, almost burnt looking base. Lift up the croissant and look at the bottom of it; if it’s almost burnt, and makes a hollow sound when you tap it, this is a good sign. It means it’s been baked for long enough and that the outside will be lovely and flaky and should almost shatter upon touching. 

6. The smell of butter: it’s all about the butter with croissants, and the baker should have used a really good quality, salted butter. You should be able to smell it, and your fingers should be a bit greasy from handling it. If it’s already made a grease mark in its paper bag from the bakery, you know it’s at least going to be buttery. 

7. Definable layers: when you look at the top of the croissant, before you cut into it or break it with your hands, you should be able to see the layers of the pastry and how thin they are. The sign of a great baker is the amount of layers they can squeeze into the croissant. More layers equals more air, more butter, more texture and, most importantly, more flavour. 

8. The ingredients of a croissant should be simple: butter (salted), strong white flour, egg, water, yeast, and a little sugar (but not always sugar). If you see loads more ingredients on the packet than this, it means a) they probably haven’t been made by hand, and b) there’s probably a load of gunk in there to make sure they have a longer shelf-life. They must have butter, though. If you buy a croissant in a packet and it doesn’t have butter listed on the ingredients, step away from that croissant!

9. Once you’ve eaten the croissant, you should notice lots of crumbs, or rather flakes of the crust or shell of the croissant. This a good sign, and a sign that the baker has made a beautifully light croissant. 

10. Price: A good, very good croissant should be reassuringly expensive, given the quantity of butter (not cheap these days), time and manual labour required to produce one.

Buttery Yeaty French Bakeries

As a young person, I didn’t really get the chance to travel that far, but when I was able to visit my cousin who lived and worked in Paris as a translator, I jumped a the chance, particularly as I was studying for my A Level French at the time, so I could pass it off as research. Visiting her was my first ime in Paris, but it turned out to be the first of several trips to France to visit other friends, particularly in Paris, followed by a residential language bursary at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris. Over the years then I’ve visited quite a few French bakeries, and when I go back, it’s always the highlight of the trip, to the point where the bakeries are becoming destinations in themselves. It’s the smell of the butter though, that has stayed with me. There is nothing like walking into a French bakery which has been making its own croissants, and that sweet, yeasty smell the moment you walk through the door. Making your own croissants, though, allows you to have a go at recreating this in your own kitchen, minus the grumpy cashier who’s just overcharged you. 

New Year, New You?

January is a time most associated with abstinence and healthy eating as an antidote to or reprieve from the feasting season which precedes it, but I can’t help but feel like there is something joyful about welcoming in the new year with this golden multi-layered buttery beauty. Not only is it a way of signalling an intent to enjoy the flavours of life, but also an acknowledgement that such flavours and textures, if they are to be remarkable, are worth slowing down, and waiting for. Baking croissants is a lesson in patience, and how layers, depth, can only come with time. 

So, who’s with me? ‘Lam-in-ate good times, come on!’