It is a buttery, flaky, viennoiserie pastry inspired by the shape of the Austrian kipferl , but using the French yeast-leavened laminated dough. The dough is layered with butter , rolled and folded several times in succession, then rolled into a thin sheet, in a technique called laminating. The process results in a layered, flaky texture, similar to a puff pastry. Crescent-shaped breads have been made since the Renaissance , and crescent-shaped cakes possibly since antiquity.
In the late s, the development of factory-made, frozen , preformed but unbaked dough made them into a fast food that could be freshly baked by unskilled labor. Croissants are a common part of a continental breakfast in many European countries. The kipferl , an Austrian crescent-shaped pastry, can be dated back to at least the 13th century in Austria, and came in various shapes.
In either or , an Austrian artillery officer, August Zang , founded a Viennese bakery "Boulangerie Viennoise" at 92, rue de Richelieu in Paris. The French version of the kipferl was named for its crescent croissant shape and has become a universally identifiable shape across the world.
The earliest known recipe for the present-day croissant appears in , although the name croissant appears among the "fantasy or luxury breads" in Zang himself returned to Austria in to become a press magnate, but the bakery remained popular for some time afterwards, and was mentioned in several works of the time: "This same M.
Zank [ sic ] It was typically used not on its own but for shells holding other ingredients as in a vol-au-vent. It does not appear to be mentioned in relation to the croissant until the 20th century. Sylvain Claudius Goy was a French chef who is sometimes said to have recorded the earliest recipe of the modern croissant.
