How croissants are made
A croissant is a bread dough folded around butter so many times that it bakes into hundreds of flaky sheets.
- stations
- 7
- things upstream
- 32
- raw sources
- 12
- steps from the ground
- 9
The short version
Yeast dough is rolled out, covered with a slab of butter and folded repeatedly, a technique called laminating. The folded sheet is cut into triangles that are rolled into crescents, proofed until puffy and baked. Steam from the butter and dough pushes the layers apart. Many factories freeze the shaped dough for bakeries.
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Mix the base dough
Flour, water, yeast, sugar, salt and a little butter or milk make a dough that is soft but not too elastic. It rests in the cold so the yeast does not run ahead.
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Lock in the butter
A flat slab of cold butter is placed on the sheet of dough and sealed inside like an envelope. The butter has to stay cool enough to stay solid but soft enough to roll without cracking.
Goes in -
Roll and fold repeatedly
The dough and butter are rolled together into a long sheet and folded in thirds, again and again, with rests in between. Each fold multiplies the number of alternating layers of dough and fat.
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Cut into triangles
The thin laminated sheet is sliced into long triangles by a rotary cutter, with almost no waste.
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Roll them up
Each triangle is rolled from the wide edge toward the tip and curved into a crescent. Machines on the line do this at high speed.
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Proof until puffy
The crescents sit in a warm room while yeast makes gas. The layers swell, but the room must not be hot enough to melt the butter out.
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Bake until golden
Water in the dough and butter turns to steam in the oven and lifts each layer apart. Melted butter fries the layers crisp, and the surface browns. Factory lines freeze unbaked croissants so shops can bake them fresh.
Worth repeating
- The first recipe corresponding to the modern croissant was published in Paris in 1906.
- In the late 1970s, frozen unbaked dough let unskilled staff bake croissants fresh, and a French fast-food chain was built around them.
- Austrian officer August Zang opened a Viennese bakery in Paris in 1838 or 1839 that helped popularize the kipferl, the croissant's ancestor.
Back to the ground
Follow every input upstream and croissant starts as these 12 raw sources.
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Sources
Cite this page: "How croissants are made." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/croissant