Add butter, eggs, milk and sugar to dough and it becomes soft and rich. Fold butter into it in layers and it becomes flaky.
Key idea
Enriched doughs (brioche, challah, milk bread, cinnamon rolls) contain fat, eggs, dairy or sugar, which tenderize the crumb, brown the crust and slow the yeast. Laminated doughs have a block of butter folded into the dough and rolled and folded again and again to build hundreds of thin layers: croissant and Danish (yeasted), puff pastry (no yeast). In the oven, water in the butter turns to steam and pushes the layers apart.
- Keep everything cold when laminating; chill the dough between folds.
- A "letter fold" (three layers) triples the layers each time: three letter folds give 27 layers of butter.
- Brioche can be 50% butter or more by baker's percentage; add soft butter slowly after the gluten is built.
- Proof croissants somewhere warm but cool enough that the butter stays solid (below about 78°F).
Why it works
If the butter melts into the dough, there are no separate layers left to puff. That's why pastry kitchens are kept cool and why croissant dough rests in the refrigerator between folds.
Worked example: Count the layers
How many layers of butter after four letter folds (each fold triples them), starting from one?
- $3^4 = 81$.
Answer: 81 layers.
Common mistake
Letting the butter get too warm or too cold. Too warm, it smears into the dough; too cold, it shatters into pieces instead of rolling out in sheets.
Practice at home
- Make brioche buns. Then, on a cool day, make croissants over two days, following the Meal Prep recipe's chilling times exactly.
In Meal Prep
- Brioche
- Challah
- Croissants: laminated dough, step by step