Production

Croissant Formula in Baker's Percent: Laminated Dough with Butter

By Robert Roessler, Food Scientist · Published 14 November 2026

The croissant is a yeasted dough with butter laminated into it through three simple turns. This page gives the formula in baker's percent, the temperatures that matter, and three ways a bakery proofs it: one shared proofer, a dedicated room, or frozen pre-proofed.

The formula

For 500 g of flour the dough has 250 g of milk, 31.3 g of sugar, 37.5 g of fresh yeast, 50 g of butter, 12.5 g of salt and 7.5 g of malt, and 212.5 g of butter for the turns, 1,101 g in total. These numbers come from a home recipe for a laminated dough with 400 g of flour, 200 g of milk, 25 g of sugar, 30 g of fresh yeast, 40 g of butter, 10 g of salt, 6 g of malt extract and 170 g of lamination butter, 881 g in total. Milk is 200 ÷ 400 × 100 = 50 %, lamination butter is 170 ÷ 400 × 100 = 42.5 %.

Scaled to bakery batches

How the numbers are calculated

1. Add the percentages. 100 + 50 + 6.25 + 7.5 + 10 + 2.5 + 1.5 + 42.5 = 220.25 %. Total dough weight is always flour weight × 2.203.
2. From the dough you want to the flour you need. Flour = dough weight ÷ 2.203. For 11 croissants of 80 g you need 880 g of dough, so 880 ÷ 2.203 = 400 g of flour.
3. From the flour to each ingredient. Ingredient = flour × percent ÷ 100. With 400 g of flour: whole milk 200 g, sugar 25 g, fresh yeast 30 g, butter in the dough 40 g, salt 10 g, malt extract 6 g, lamination butter 170 g.
4. Pieces from a batch. 10 kg of flour makes 22,025 g of dough. At 80 g per piece that is 275 pieces.

You can do the same with the baker's percentage calculator: enter the percentages above and tick flour and liquid.

Decoration

Decoration is part of the formula. The croissant is only complete with its egg wash, so the egg wash belongs in the recipe and in the costing. It is not added to the dough weight and the baker's percent above. Nothing is sprinkled on top after the egg wash.

• Egg wash: egg and water, as for the milk roll: 1 part egg to 3 parts water, or 1 to 2, or 1 to 1, depending on how much egg the bakery wants to use. Ready-made egg wash for croissants is also on the market. No salt, because salt causes spotty, blotchy colour. Brush it on evenly and use fresh egg wash.
• Amount: 3 to 4 g per croissant is an estimate. A croissant has about the same surface as a milk roll, so the amount is about the same.

In the bakery

• Temperature is the main rule. Keep the dough cold, about 19 °C, and the lamination butter or lamination fat at the same temperature, neither warmer nor colder. During rolling the room should not be much warmer; 22 °C is still acceptable. At 30 to 35 °C and above in the bakery you cannot make croissants, and you need a separate, temperature-controlled room for croissants and other laminated doughs.
• Mixing: mix the dough only 2 to 3 minutes, do not knead it.
• Laminating: three simple turns. This is the simplest and the best method for good croissants. Too few layers or far too many layers, for example from an accidental double turn, make the layers fuse together again.
• Rests: in the cooler at about 6 °C. 30 minutes after the butter is enclosed, at least 30 minutes after turn 1 and after turn 2, and 1 to 2 hours after turn 3. The dough is made the day before.
• Shaping (home recipe): roll the sheet to 3 to 4 mm and 28 cm wide, cut triangles with a base of 8 cm and roll them up. The whole dough in the table gives 10 to 12 croissants.
• Route 1, one proofer for everything (the usual craft bakery): the pieces go into the proofer at 37 °C and 85 to 89 % humidity for only about 20 minutes, so the butter does not melt completely. Then take them out and let them stiffen at room temperature before baking. Croissants need this stiffening time in any case.
• Route 2, a bakery that only makes croissants: proof at 26 to 28 °C for about 1 hour to 1 hour 20 minutes. Two hours is too long. The main lift of a croissant comes from the water that leaves the butter, and a proof that is too long destroys the gluten structure.
• Route 3, frozen pre-proofed: today this is the usual route. Make the croissants in advance, proof them, and freeze them, ideally in a blast freezer at about −23 °C, so that the water freezes quickly and the gluten network is damaged as little as possible. Take them out when needed, let them thaw and stiffen briefly at room temperature, and bake. Delivered frozen pieces are handled the same way. Fresh production only for the exact order is expensive, and overproduction leaves no margin.
• Before the oven: brush the pieces with egg wash, as in the decoration table above.
• Baking: 190 °C in a fan oven, in practice usually a rack oven, for about 20 minutes. Load the croissants and give steam straight away, a setting in the middle to upper third of the range and not full steam. After about one minute pull the draft and let the steam escape. Never give steam at the end of the bake. The rest of the baking time is without steam.

Things to watch

• The two figures that are not from the bakery are the dough piece weight and the shaping sizes. They come from a home recipe: the whole dough (881 g from 400 g of flour) gives 10 to 12 croissants, so a dough piece is about 73 to 88 g. The worked example below uses 80 g.
• Layers fuse: too few or too many layers, for example an accidental double turn, or a cut with a blunt or dirty knife that smears the layers. Cut cleanly with a sharp edge.
• Dough or butter too warm: the butter melts, runs out and the layers are lost. Dough about 19 °C, butter the same, room 22 °C at most. In summer you need a separate temperature-controlled room.
• Proof too long or at the wrong temperature: at 37 °C the butter melts, and a proof that is too long destroys the gluten structure. Keep to the proof times in the three routes above. A proof that is too long also gives a flat shape and coarse pores.
• Handling of the dough pieces matters. Handle them gently, and let them stiffen before the oven.
• Steam: never at the end of the bake. Give it at loading, pull the draft after about one minute.
• Faults of the egg wash: applied unevenly, so the croissants look patchy; old egg wash, which smells bad and can leave spotty, blotchy colour; too much water in it, so the surface does not shine; and salt in the egg wash.
• Decoration forgotten: in many bakeries the decoration is left out of the recipe and of the costing. Count the egg wash as an ingredient.
• After the freezer: uneven browning and dry spots come from drying in storage, a loose crust from too thick a crust or too long in the freezer, and blisters on the crust from freezing too slowly or too much humidity when thawing. Freeze fast, store covered and as short as possible.
• Most common faults in the bakery in general: weighing errors, wrong dough temperature, wrong oven temperature, baked too dark or too dry, and touching the pieces too much.

Sources

• King Arthur Baking: Baker's Percentage (professional reference)
• BAKERpedia: Baker's Percent
• Wissensforum Backwaren: Fehler bei Brot und Kleingebäck und deren Beseitigung (Detlef Reineke, 3rd edition 2009)

Information current as of 14 November 2026. The formula is a starting point and needs your own trials with your flour, mixer and oven.