Easy Gluten-Free Croissant Recipe (Beginner Recipe) (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to a good croissant? ›

Master the technique of laminating

This step is crucial in the process to ensure the steam effectively lifts the layers apart during baking. So the chef's secret is in the extra care and attention during laminating to enhance the flaky, weightless, buttery layers of the perfect croissant.

Although you can produce excellent croissants from all-purpose flour, bread flour, or frozen packaged white dough, the high gluten content makes for hard and rubbery rolling out. A mixture of 2 parts unbleached pastry flour and 1 part unbleached all-purpose flour gives a dough that is much easier to handle.

First and foremost, you should use European or European-style butter which consists of 83% to 84% of butterfat. It should be 68° Fahrenheit and in the consistency of cream cheese, spreadable with a spatula.

Croissants can contain whole eggs, egg yolks, or egg whites depending on the recipe. Eggs can be added to the dough to help create a tender and flaky texture in the finished product.

Before baking, chill proofed croissants for 20 minutes. Preheat oven to 375°F.

By law, only a croissant made with 100% pure butter can wear a straight shape as a badge of honor. A croissant made with any other fat, such as margarine or (sacrebleu!) oil, must disclose its impurity with a curved shape.

Crescent rolls have a similar crescent-moon shape as croissants, but most aspects of these baked goods are different. Unlike croissants, crescent rolls are not laminated. This makes crescent rolls more bread-like than croissants.

For those of you who are abroad, you may notice that a lot of my recipes calls for T45 flour. If you don't have this on hand, you can mix some all-purpose flour with corn starch to have a quick alternative to cake flour at home. Cake Flour – 1 cup minus 2 tbsp (100g) all purpose flour + 2 tbsp cornstarch.

The fat and lactose in milk help with tenderizing the crumb of the bread making it softer and sweeter. The crust of the bread also gets more caramelization.

A classic French croissant has 55 layers (27 layers of butter), achieved with a French fold followed by 3 letter folds. Less layers will mean a different texture (less tender, more chewy, with more defined layers). Too many layers bring a risk of the butter getting too thin and melting into the dough.

Should croissants leak butter when baking? ›

A higher water content tends to make butter hard, which promotes tearing and breaking and ruins the layers. Your butter needs to be pliable and at the same time not too soft at the moment of usage. Help, butter leaks out when baking! Your croissants were probably under-proofed.

This way you will have more time for the whole process and less chance of your precious butter being absorbed by the dough. The key is to keep the butter solid between the layers of dough, this is what gives the croissant its flaky layers.

To make them rise faster, she proofs them in an oven that is turned off but has a pan of hot water, which warms the oven just enough for proofing. And to keep the delicate croissants from burning on the bottom as they cook, she uses what she calls the “double-pan” method.

The first layer of egg wash is applied before proofing to prevent the skin from drying out. You could cover the top of the tray with cling film but that just makes for caution of sticking to the croissants. The second egg wash is applied right before baking for extra shine and color of the baked croissant.

When making croissants, butter and dough are folded into hundreds of individual layers. As a croissant bakes, the butter melts and the water content in the butter turns into steam. It's that steam being trapped by the gluten in the dough that creates the delicate, flaky layers in a perfect croissant.

As an online collective we seem to have agreed that what makes a croissant look good is a sharp and well defined shape; distinct, clearly visible lamination or separation of layer; and a perfect honeycomb spiral interior cross-section.

The delightful flaky, buttery layers in these pastries result from lamination. Lamination refers to the process of butter and dough being repeatedly rolled and folded together. This technique creates increasingly thinner alternating layers of butter and dough.