Ispahan Croissants

A couple of days ago I flew from Toronto to San Francisco! My brother promised to take me to Chile once I had graduated high school (this was a promise he made six years ago), but I recently decided to switch destinations to the land of sourdough bread.

Regular croissants are boring. Try making these instead, with a raspberry and lychee filling. Here, I'm sprinkling freeze dried raspberries over the Ispahan croissants. Click for the recipe!

Before I left, I made these amazing Ispahan croissants, which were inspired by Pierre Hermé’s croissants of the same name. Inside these croissants is homemade rose-scented almond paste and a delightful raspberry-lychee gelée. These are also glazed with rose icing and crunchy freeze-dried raspberries. The Ispahan croissants are totally amazing and surprisingly not much more difficult to make than regular croissants!

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Tutorial: French Croissants

Croissants aren’t bread rolls; they’re more than half butter. Croissants, with their 70+ rich and flaky layers, are a must-try item in any French bakery. Regardless, few bakeries can beat a homemade croissant. Even if cutting your croissant doesn’t reveal a cross section with a perfect honeycomb of layers, the buttery treat is sure to impress even the pickiest of eaters.

EDIT (April 1st, 2013): I originally wrote this croissant tutorial on August 13, 2012 and wasn’t completely satisfied with the results. The croissants were delicious, sure, but they weren’t perfect. The pictures were pretty embarrassing as well since the batch came out flat due to improper lamination. I also recently realized that the croissant history I shared was not accurate. My post on French croissants was actually about German croissants. Sigh. I’ve spent a while working on this recipe to significantly improve it, and that’s what this updated post now contains.

If you want to kick your croissants up a notch, you can also check out my Ispahan croissant post with instructions for raspberry, rose, and lychee croissants. You can find it here.

Homemade, fresh, and fluffy croissants

Croissants are made with a yeast-leavened dough that is folded with butter in a process called “lamination”. While baking, the layers of butter give off steam and cause the layers of dough to separate, leaving large gaps. The quality of a croissant can be determined by studying the size of the gaps, since large gaps are a result of proper lamination.

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