Unintentionally so, this piece is a natural follow-up, or companion, to the last essay I shared, “Bakery Time,” which you can read here.
My first forays into croissant-making — laminating layers of butter and leavened dough together — happened at the end of December, two years ago. Though outside temperatures were in the 30s, the sun streaming in through the windows and the toasty warmth from the radiator transformed the kitchen’s climate. I was in our apartment, laminating by hand, rolling out and giving letter-folds to the dough on the two-and-a-half feet of counter space that serves as our main food preparation area. Based on how that first batch of croissants turned out (technically very imperfect, but delicious nonetheless), I know now that the butter became too warm to work with; it melted into the dough, making those croissants look more like Pillsbury crescent rolls than an elegant knoll comprised of distinct flaky layers. These are visible reminders of the work you put into maintaining the temperature and texture of your dough and butter, of everything you’ve learned about how butter and enriched dough react to heat. Perhaps more than the final product of that first batch, I fell in love with croissants’ three-day process, of the feel of the dough in my hands, and the labor of folding dough and butter together to create a system of layers.
When I began making croissants in a bakery, with the pointed interest of learning lamination in a more structured setting, it was autumn, just over a year ago. I spent six weeks trying to wrap my head around the myriad details that go into making croissants — how best to prepare the block of butter that creates a croissant’s layers, figuring out a technique and process for the series of folds that the dough and butter undergo, accustoming myself to using a mechanical laminator to stretch the dough, the muscles in my hands learning how to handle the cut triangles of dough as I shaped the croissants, developing a sense for the signs that the croissants have proofed and that they are ready for baking — before I baked a batch that I was happy with, a batch that didn’t collapse from over-proofing or burst at the middle from under-proofing, a batch that proudly showed an evenly-distributed honeycomb pattern that defines the croissant’s interior.
Getting to that point felt like a huge accomplishment, and it was a significant milestone, but then, I didn’t yet realize from that month and a half of poring over Bread Bakers Guild of America forum questions, studiously watching YouTube videos of shaping techniques at home after work, and then devotedly trying to apply that information to what I was baking was just the tip of the iceberg of understanding croissants. I hadn’t yet realized how much croissants would make me more attuned to the seasons.
That first decent batch of croissants was from mid-November; as Wisconsin’s climate chilled in late December, ushering in the deepest frigidity experienced during January and February, I had to adapt my baking routine, push my understanding of how long croissants take to proof, in response to the weather. Rather than taking 12 or 13 hours for the fermentation to develop, the deep wintertime croissants asked for 18, even up to 20, hours of proofing before being ready to bake.
Springtime was an interlude between winter and summer’s opposing extremes. Working with the dough was, simply, easier: it didn’t require manipulating the thermostat to keep the dough warm enough for the yeasts to remain active overnight, or ask that we strategically place racks of dough closer to the ovens for a last willful push of fermentation. This seasonal change meant, too, that there was new produce to work with for filling pastries. After four months of making fruit compotes out of our frozen reserves of summer fruits to fill the shell of a danish, and of filling twice-baked croissants with varied combinations of mushrooms, potatoes, and onions, there was the chance to experiment with new ways of incorporating locally grown vegetables into the pastries, like rolling a spear of asparagus or a slice of carrot into a croissant — a splash of vernal vibrance after a long winter.
I spent summer rushing flat sheets of butter into the walk-in cooler to sit while I rolled out the dough they would be laminated into, to cool down enough so that the butter wouldn’t melt into the dough. When the heat index was 105℉, and the temperature in the bakery couldn’t be coaxed below 85℉, working with the dough took on new urgency as the temperature’s influence exposed the dough’s delicacy. I also learned how durable and resilient the dough is: things that I was once much more ginger about proved to allow for more leeway. I gained a better understanding of the dough’s limits.
Toward the end of the summer, I met a fellow pastry baker, a new friend, for coffee: among the details shared about our personal lives and our common interest in pastry, we emphatically exclaimed, together, “Yes! It takes a full year to learn how to make croissants!”
Working in sourdough and with locally grown flours, adds up to make these seasonal differences all the more apparent. During the summer, our bread flour changed from being a soft spring to a hard winter wheat variety. We come to expect these changes at certain points in the year: they mark harvests, and are reflections of the environmental conditions in which the crop was grown. When we have to transition to a flour’s new harvest, it can at first seem like an annoyance, a challenge that interrupts the production schedule of the week as we adapt to its different fermentation behavior or adjust the hydration in our recipes.
Like I wrote about In “Bakery Time,” sourdough baking’s reliance on slow time runs counter to, and resists, modernity’s speed. As much as it is a temporal practice, it is an environmental one, and baking with local grains further amplifies the significant mark of where we are baking that is left on our breads and pastries. This connects us, as bakers, to the land. In understanding the ingredients I am baking with, and eating, I’m better able to understand myself and the ways in which I relate to the land. When we experience changes in our flour, it is a reminder of our ingredients being full of life, and our responsibility to transform those ingredients into nourishment to be shared with our community.
That first time that I made croissants, at home, I was searching for a renewed sense of life, of emotional nourishment. I made the first batch almost exactly a month after my dad passed away: following intricate instructions in layering, shaping, and proofing, and sharing the end product with my partner and our friends was the first thing in my state of raw grief that gave me refreshed energy. There was a new, gaping void in my life, and I had to create something and share it with others to feel like I was moving toward healing.
In the eulogy he gave at my dad’s funeral, my uncle referred to my dad as “a man for all seasons,” someone “who is right for the moment, no matter what.” My dad was a geographer at heart, and paid close attention to the spaces around him, curious about their histories and their possibilities, interested in how life relates to environment. At its core, making croissants is inextricably attached to my process with grief. As I’ve grappled over the last year with continually adapting to the seasonal idiosyncrasies of laminated pastry, my dad has been with me, reminding me how to handle each moment with curiosity and the humility to learn, no matter what.
Your dad would be so pleased to see your accomplishments! ❤️
I had to read this twice to get a fuller grasp of the process, the challenges, and the healing you’ve encountered through baking. Proud of you, daughter. Beautiful write.