22/08/2026
Most people assume the holes in a croissant come from yeast. They don’t.
Butter is sixteen per cent water. We fold 840 layers of it into the dough, and in a hot oven that water flashes to steam and expands about sixteen hundred times. It has nowhere to go but sideways and up, so it forces every layer apart and holds them there until the dough sets around the gap.
Every hole you can see is a space where butter used to be.
The hard part is that gluten is what normally holds those layers together while you fold. It’s an elastic net that lets the dough stretch paper thin without tearing. Ours has none, so we didn’t adapt a recipe, we rebuilt the whole thing from scratch.
Eight years on this. Still changing it.
Peace, love and croissants.