The Secret To Making Flavorful Bakery-Style Croissants At Home

It's the first thing you smell when you get off the plane in Paris: butter. The sweet and savory fragrance wafts through the streets and leads you directly to any one of the city's estimated 1,300 patisseries and boulangeries in search of the perfect flaky, light, and airy croissant. You don't have to fly all the way to Paris to get the rich, creamy flavor of a freshly-baked croissant, though. All you need to do is find the secret ingredient that creates the beautifully layered and rolled pastry at home: European or European-style butter, which is not the same as American or even Irish butter.

Croissants get their flaky lightness from a process called lamination, during which bakers create a block of cold butter and place it in the center of the dough. The dough is then folded over the butter and rolled out, a process that is repeated several times with some periods of resting and refrigeration in between. While the process may seem daunting, pastry chefs say the key to getting the right texture is the use of European butter, which has more butterfat and less water than American butter. In the European Union (E.U.), unsalted butter (the only kind you want to use when making croissants) must have at least 82% butterfat and no more than 16 percent water, by weight. Standards in the United States are different. Here, butter must have at least 80% butterfat, which is what you'll commonly find at your grocery store.

Why is butter so important to making bakery-quality croissants? Having more milkfat gives the butter a richer flavor and makes it easier to work with, allowing users to create smooth layers in croissants that are impossibly light and flaky. In fact, you might even want to look for butter with 84% to 87% milkfat. 

It's not as difficult finding European butter in U.S. supermarkets as you may think. In fact, several brands, including Kerrygold and Président, are on top of Chowhound's definitive ranking of grocery store butter brands. That list of favorites also includes some American brands that go above the U.S. standards –- like Plugrà, Vital Farms, and Vermont Creamery –- and make European-style butters with 82% or higher butterfat.

Once you have your higher-fat butter, you'll be on your way to making flavorful croissants at home. But make sure you don't slather the butter on the croissant once it's out of the oven — butter is great inside the pastry but it's considered a faux pas to top your croissant with that classic condiment.