The origins

 

The ancestor of the croissant, the Austro-Hungarian kipferl, has the texture of a brioche.

This crescent-shaped pastry is probably traditional in Austria since at least the year 1000. It would be inspired by the shape of the crescent moon. It was a pastry made in convents at the time of Easter, but with a simple puff pastry not puff, close to the current kipferls.

 

Several legends circulate about the invention of the croissant. A tradition made of Marie-Antoinette of Austria, which officially introduced and popularized the croissant in France from 1770.

 

It would be on this occasion that the legend of the origin of the croissant would have been told: during the siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683, while the Ottomans wanted to take advantage of the darkness of the night to dig a tunnel under the walls of the city, The Viennese bakers up before dawn to prepare their batch would have sounded the alarm. To celebrate the victory of the Polish and Austrian troops over the Ottoman troops, the bakers would have fashioned a pastry (called Hörnchen, literally «little horn») in the shape that recalled the emblem on the Ottoman flags.

 

According to another Viennese legend, hundreds of soldiers and officers received presents after the battle as a reward for their courage. Among them was Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, a spy soldier, diplomat, and Polish merchant who owned Vienna’s first coffee shop, Zur blauen Flasche («The Blue Bottle»), who obtained 300 bags of black beans that the Turks had abandoned during their flight. Intrigued, Kulczycki had the coffee beans ground and offered them to the Viennese, without success. He then came up with the idea of serving this coffee with a pastry. He ordered it from a bakery in the city, which decided to make pastries in the shape of a Turkish crescent.

 

Croissants served with coffee.

 

The term "croissant" first appeared in a dictionary in 1863. Littré mentions it thus: «Small bread or cake in the shape of a crescent»; Pierre Larousse indicates, in the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, tome cinquième, de 1869, “A croissant-shaped bun, croissants are made with high-quality flour and water that contains beaten eggs.”

 

The first recipe was published in 1891, but it was different from the one we have today. The first recipe for a puff croissant was published in France for the first time in 1905 and it was not until the 1920s that this «viennoiserie» was successful.

 

Manufacturing

 

In France, croissant dough is a puff pastry like that of chocolate bread. It uses the same principles as normal puff pastry, except that it contains baker’s yeast that will make the dough swell before and during cooking. Puff pastry generally requires less butter than conventional puff pastry.

 

If originally the croissant was made with a paste similar to that of the brioche, around 1900, we note the use of a paste closer to the puff pastry. The term for this trend is the butter croissant, whose straight shape means it no longer has the shape of a “crescent.”

 

As with bread, the croissant is best baked in a sole oven that grabs the dough and gives it a crisp that is the real quality mark of the croissant. With the ventilated, timed-cooking ovens, there is a homogenization that, according to chef Yves Camdeborde, “no longer takes into account the quantity of yeast or the different flours” and “removes all the human touch, personality and know-how of the craftsman.”

 

According to pastry chef Christophe Felder, there are a total of «fifty parameters to master to make a good croissant» of which «the quality of the flour and butter used (...) the time of fermentation of the dough, the way to incorporate the butter, to shape the croissant, the heat of the oven, the time of cooking...»