When less is more: Why fewer folds make a better croissant

Sometimes it feels like more is better, especially when you're in the kitchen. More chocolate, more pizza, more salt, more recipes: all things that should have limitless limits, if you ask me. Although in only a few special cases, less really is more. Being less anxious and doing less work can yield a better end product. This is the story of a surprising (and extremely loud) character: the chocolate croissant, known as pain au chocolat.

Let me introduce you to ours Chocolate bread recipe, originally added to our website in 2009, courtesy of our research and development team. Loosely based on ours Baker's Croissantsit starts with a slightly enriched sourdough that wraps a beautiful block of butter and sticky rich, dark chocolate.

A block of butter about to be encased in enriched laminating dough — The dough rolling process begins with a dreamy, smooth block of butter.

As with most laminated dough. the butter is sealed from the dough (or “knuckles”), and then the dough is rolled and folded repeatedly to create many layers. The original recipe calls for four sets of what bakers call either “single folds” or “letter folds.”

What is letter folding, you ask? The dough is basically folded into thirds, like folding a piece of paper to put in a business envelope. The bottom third is folded up and covers the middle third, and then the top third is folded down, covering the same section.

A baker folding laminated dough into thirds — The result of folding a single letter is almost three times as many layers as you started with.

This process of making letter folds is repeated three more times in the original Pain au Chocolat recipe, with several rest periods in between. The end result is 163 layers from dough and butter!

If you're thinking that almost 200 layers seems excessive, you might be onto something.

A baker who rolls out sulfur dough — In trying to create tastier pastries at home, our original recipe required a lot of twisting and folding.

How many folds are too many?

“Man, that's a lot of folding!”

This is exactly what King Arthur baked the ambassador Martin Philip he thought as he started playing with the Pain au Chocolat recipe in hopes of coming up with one chocolate version.

To see if his gut instinct was right, Martin compared the four-letter process to other popular bakers and bakeries. Of course, bakers like former King Arthur Bakery director Jeffrey Hamelman, Roger Gural (formerly of Arcade Bakery in Tribeca), Karen Bornarth (of Hot Bread Kitchen in Brooklyn), and Bruno Albouze (of the eponymous bakery in San Diego), and even Team USA at the 2016 World Cup (World Cup Baking) all use fewer folds (and in some cases much less folds) in their croissants.

Was there something these bakers were achieving that we were missing in our doughs?

Rolled dough ready to be shaped into a pain or chocolate — The only way to find out if pastries made with fewer folds give a better, messier result? Try baking!

What are we missing?

Now that it was clear that King Arthur's original Pain au Chocolat recipe had many more folds, and thus more layers, than similar recipes, it was time to let the baked goods do the talking.

A cross section showing the laminated dough with more folds and more layers — Laminated dough made with four folds has very thin and almost invisible layers.

Martin made the recipe as written, including four letter folds (making all 163 layers).

And then he did another version, where he aimed to create a slightly more open structure – what he described as a slightly wider “honeycomb” texture inside. This version had only two sets of folds instead of four: a letter fold followed by a “book fold” or “double fold”. (In a book fold, the two short edges of a rectangle are folded toward the center until they meet in the middle. The entire package is then folded in half in the middle, as if closing a book.)

Brioche math is a bit tricky as you have to count all the places where the dough touches the dough (it's only one layer if it's dough-butter-dough). But believe me when I say that, as incredible as it may seem, Martin reduced the number of folds from 163 layers to just 25 layers.

A cross section showing laminated dough with fewer folds and more distinct layers — This dough went through two sets of folds for a total of 25 layers of dough and butter.

Less folding in less time

There is one other key change that Martin made to the lamination process besides simply reducing the number of folds. He performed the folds back to back with no cooling time between them. *gasp!*

No cold weather? Isn't this one of the perfect back pillars? Roll out your dough, fold, chill, repeat. Isn't it essential to rest the dough, to allow the gluten to relax?

It's at a point. If you tried to perform the original four sets of back-to-back folds, you would have ended your effort in tears of frustration. It is practically impossible to roll the dough so many times at once because the gluten would become too strong. But with only two folds, the gluten is not activated as easily. The dough is more forgiving and you can almost trick it into acting if you work quickly.

Martin made this short puff pastry version, but otherwise kept the formula the same. He set the packets aside for proofing and proceeded to make two versions of Pain au Chocolat: one with the original 163 layers and one with just 25.

Two types of laminated dough, cut in half to reveal cross-sections and layers — The dough on the left took more folds and almost “broke” into pieces. The version on the right has fewer layers, but they are more distinct.

The proof is in the pastries

As Martin says, the structure told the tale. According to him, the original four-letter recipe had “many fine layers that pressed into each other, creating a tight structure.”

Two pains or chocolates side by side, one has more folds than the other — Cakes made from multi-layered dough (left) had a tighter spiral and more regular appearance on the outside, but that doesn't necessarily translate to a steeper, more evenly baked or chocolatey pain on the inside.

Cutting into the pastries revealed that the one with the least folds had a wonderful open texture that really looked like a honeycomb, as well as more clearly defined layers.

Two pains or chocolates side by side, cut to show texture — The croissant made from the dough with more folds (left) has a slightly “bready” texture, while the one made with less folds (right) is crispy, puffy and flaky.

What happened?

When you get to the point where your dough has over 160 layers, the butter is pressed so incredibly thin that there isn't enough moisture to create the steam that usually causes the dough layers to separate and puff up. Plus, the dough stretches so tightly that it resists the movement of the puff.

Instead of opening into a nice open crumb (that “honeycomb” texture), a croissant made from such highly manipulated dough is tight and has an almost cellular appearance on the inside – not exactly what most they ask us when we bite into a delicate, crispy croissant.

Find your junk paste

Can this really be right? Could fewer folds produce a better end product, or in this case, a more desirable croissant? The puff pastry pictures don't lie.

Laminated dough baked in sheets, side by side, comparing more folds and less — The dough that puffed the most (right) was the one that took the fewest folds – it only had 25 layers while the one on the left had 163!

This does not mean that this method is THE the final process for making puff pastry – just consider some of the French pastry chefs who go through painstaking measures to create a tightly layered structure. For them, the small cell texture is what defines success. But for others, the ultimate goal is an open honeycomb interior with a rounded, rough puffy-pasty texture.

The bottom line: what defines one person's quintessential croissant may not be the same for another, and there's room for all kinds of approaches—we just opted for an open croissant with more distinct layers. The crunchy crumbly bits that fly everywhere on the first bite are like croissant confetti, and the distinct, buttery layers beg to be peeled off one by one. It's pastry done perfectly.