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.

The pastry is prepared using flour, butter, sugar, salt, and fresh yeast. It is kneaded each day, but most of the three days is spent chilling. Literally. The nascent croissants are in the fridge.

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.

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.

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.

Croissant recipes use milk, or half and half, or milk and water in the dough. I've read that milk or half and half masked the dough softer, and water makes a crispier pastry crust.

Unlike croissants, crescent rolls are not laminated. This makes crescent rolls more bread-like than croissants. However, both croissants and crescent rolls contain yeast leading them to rise and have a lighter texture.

Help, butter leaks out when baking!

When under-proofed the butter tends to leak out from in between the layers and you end up with a butter puddle.

Consuming too much saturated fat can raise low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels in the blood. Croissants can raise these LDL cholesterol levels due to their high amount of butter, and therefore, saturated fat found in croissants.

Why are croissants bad? ›

While croissants do provide some nutritional benefits, they're also high in fats and calories. They're best enjoyed as part of a balanced diet, rather than a daily breakfast item. Pairing a croissant with fruits, lean proteins, and other nutrient-dense foods can help balance your meal.

After shaping leave your croissants to proof for one hour at room temperature to kick start the proofing process. Then place them in the fridge overnight. Make sure no air can reach the croissants, otherwise they will dry out!

Instead, you can prepare the dough the morning before you'd like to eat them (or even a day before that!); allow the dough to ferment for a few hours (or overnight) before you laminate it; then shape, proof, and bake it in the morning.

Before baking, chill proofed croissants for 20 minutes. Preheat oven to 375°F. Using a pastry brush, gently brush egg wash on each chilled croissant, avoiding cut sides that may have exposed layers of dough. Bake for 20 minutes.

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.

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.