So, I wanted to try the updated croissant recipe that I saw in Joanne Chang’s newer cookbook, Pastry Love. In my comparison chart I refer to this as “Chang 2”. Here are the differences that I saw:

• The newer recipe is for “spelt croissants” so the flour content is half spelt flour and half bread flour. Her original recipe is 3/4 all-purpose flour and 1/4 bread flour, but the overall flour volume is nearly the same, as is the flour to liquid ratio. I wasn’t interested in trying the spelt variation, but it seemed safe to stick with the original all-purpose/bread flour approach from the original recipe.

• The newer recipe eliminates the step of mixing 2T of butter into the dough itself. That 2T of butter gets added into the butter block, so it’s not removed overall. It just doesn’t have to mixed into the dough. I appreciated the idea of saving some work, so I went with this change

• Her lamination method is notably updated. Rather than book-fold/letter-fold/chill/letter-fold, this recipe has only two book-folds and that’s it. No mid-lamination chilling! Because of my prior issues with the butter breaking up after being chilled mid-lamination, I am especially excited about this change. And, it reduces the overall duration of the effort (because it takes away one chill step and one fold step). We’re now down to 16 layers (having already gone from 729 -> 36), and I haven’t seen a deterioration in the flakiness of the end result.

I should note that Joanne’s newer lamination method isn’t a classic “book fold”. I think of it as a “modified book fold” and haven’t seen it described anywhere else. It is essentially the same, and still creates the four layers as a regular book fold. The only difference is that all the dough ends are not concentrated in the middle of the dough packet. She offsets the “seam” a bit, and I think this is another tweak that helps maintain the structural integrity of the desired rectangular shape. It’s hard to explain the difference without just sending you to her book (Pastry Love), which has very helpful instructions and photos.

I love the idea that Joanne Chang and her team at Flour Bakery are looking for ways to improve things – even very good things. The lamination method has nothing to do with the spelt change, so this seems to be entirely a process improvement.

I think I haven’t explicitly mentioned that I make one Pain au Chocolat with each batch of croissants using any leftover bits of laminated dough. (You can see it in the first photo at the top of this post.) I mush the bits back together and roll them out into a rectangle, then roll up some dark chocolate batons and bake with the rest of the croissants. I have to say that these little treats, made from the “leftover bits”, have been such a delight that I think I will try to make more of an effort to allocate some proportion of the next batch to Pain au Chocolat – not just the scraps!