When: January 30
National Croissant Day celebrates the laminated butter pastry that became synonymous with French breakfast culture but was actually introduced to Paris by an Austrian artillery officer named August Zang in 1838. The croissant is a study in fat, gluten, and steam — and the version from a proper French boulangerie bears almost no resemblance to the crescent rolls in a supermarket can.
The croissant is Austrian, not French — and the technique of making one correctly is one of the most technically demanding things in baking.
The croissant's origin traces to the Austrian kipferl — a crescent-shaped bread of uncertain origin but documented in Vienna by at least the 13th century. The kipferl was a denser, yeast-leavened roll with a crescent shape, not laminated with butter. The transformation into the butter-laminated croissant is credited to a Viennese bakery opened in Paris in 1838 by August Zang, an Austrian military officer, who introduced Viennese baking techniques including the laminated dough method to the French capital. Parisian bakers adapted the technique, creating the croissant as we know it. The croissant legend connecting it to the Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) — that the crescent shape celebrates the defeat of the Ottoman crescent symbol — is almost certainly apocryphal. It appears in no contemporary source and was first written down long after the supposed event. Laminated dough is the technique that makes a croissant: a yeast dough is repeatedly folded around a flat block of butter, then...