What Type Of Flour Is Used In Traditional French Croissants?
No one makes pastries quite like the French, especially when it comes to the iconic croissant. Traditional French croissants are buttery, flaky, crescent-shaped bites of heaven with perfectly laminated layers and golden-brown exteriors. Achieving that takes skill, and it all starts with the right ingredients.
Croissants are made with just a few key ingredients: Butter, yeast, milk, sugar, water, and flour. The quality of each is crucial for achieving an authentic result. French or dry butter, which has a higher melting point, is recommended, as is pastry flour.
Pastry flour, also labeled T45 flour for its refinement level, is made with soft wheat that's milled more finely. This results in a lower protein content, about 8–10%, compared to all-purpose flour, which contains 10–12% protein. The lower protein content leads to more delicate, lighter baked goods. T45 flour helps give croissants their signature tender, flaky texture, so it's an important element.
Is the flour that important?
Pastry flour is the most commonly used flour in France, but it's not as widely available in the U.S. You can often find it in larger supermarkets or specialty stores, and it's available to purchase online, but it's not the end of the world if you can't track it down. However, it might make a slight difference to your croissants.
All-purpose flour, or T55 flour, is the next best option, though it can result in a chewier pastry. Bread flour (T65) has an even higher protein content than all-purpose flour, so save that for French bread and baguettes. Cake flour, meanwhile, sits on the other end of the spectrum with the lowest protein content of all wheat flours (5 to 8%). It's bleached during milling and is best suited to ultra-light cakes like fluffy angel food cake and chiffon.
However, if you have it on hand, you can mix ½ cup cake flour with ½ all-purpose flour to replace a cup of pastry flour. Baking homemade croissants requires many steps, and believe it or not, tracking down the right flour is one of the easier ones, so it's worth it to try to figure it out.