Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
Our cookbook of the week is Lune by Kate Reid, director and founder of the Melbourne bakery of the same name. To try a recipe from the book, check out: tiramisu, finger bun, and croissant ‘bread and butter’ pudding.
The early 2010s marked a new era for croissants. Dominique Ansel debuted the Cronut on May 10, 2013, in New York, setting off a ripple effect of buttery waves with the deep-fried hybrid pastry. On the other side of the world, in Melbourne, former Formula One aerodynamicist Kate Reid was 11 months into reimagining the croissant at her micro bakery, Lune.
Reid’s croissanterie outgrew its micro status soon after she started, and in 2016, Oliver Strand of The New York Times declared that her version of the pastry “may be the finest you will find anywhere in the world, and alone worth a trip across the dateline.” She now has 180 staff members and five locations in two Australian states. Her non-traditional style continues to inspire lines around the block as she uses her engineering approach to push the boundaries of a century-old pastry.
(Based on the Austrian kipferl, the buttery, flaky French version of the croissant so famous today first appeared in the early 20th century.)
“It’s not like when I’m making croissants, I wind tunnel test them or anything like that. But I think in retrospect, looking back on my years at university, while I guess there were very deliverable things we learned — like theorems and formulas and concepts — for me, university really taught me how to break down a problem in an engineering way,” says Reid.
After graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering and working for several years as part of a Formula One racing team — a dream since childhood — Reid turned to baking, working in cafés and bakeries in Melbourne and staging at Du Pain et des Idées in Paris. When she returned to Melbourne after her one-month internship, Reid noticed that despite having an outstanding coffee culture, quality croissants were lacking.
She attempted to recreate what she had learned in Paris, and soon realized that though she thought she understood the process, she only knew about 10 per cent. So, she set out to reverse-engineer the croissant. Three months later, she had created the Lune version, which was different from any other she had encountered. In June 2012, she set up shop and started supplying some of Melbourne’s best cafés.
“The technique that we’ve landed on at Lune is very different from the classic French technique. But because it’s not tied to a centuries-old technique that’s passed down from master baker to master baker, at Lune, every single day, every part of the process that we use to make the croissants is up for critical analysis. So, that’s a really engineering way of approaching it.”
https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/luneCoverInline.jpg?quality="90&strip=all&w=576&sig=kLaCfqukrv7UV4McGm3enQ 2x" height="1324" loading="lazy" src="https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/luneCoverInline.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=288&sig=IyQA2bsLpXeCkHsq8cgbiA" width="1000"/>
Her cookbook debut, Lune: Croissants All Day, All Night (Hardie Grant, 2023), presented the opportunity to examine the process anew. The cornerstone of the book is neither how they make croissants at Lune nor the classic French method, but a “highly unorthodox” recipe Reid developed for the home baker, which was a journey in and of itself.
Writing the book coincided with Melbourne’s second lockdown, which lasted nearly four months. Reid was working from home, which turned out to be an advantage. She had access to the same tools her readers would: a domestic oven, rolling pin and stand mixer.
Reid started development by having Lune chefs make her two kilograms of croissant dough every day, so she could test lamination (the process of rolling and folding butter and dough to create thin layers of pastry) using a rolling pin instead of the laminator they use at the bakery. “I was literally beating my head against a brick wall. I’d had these ideas of how I could change the laminating to make it easier. And I’d maybe had 40 or 50 per cent success, but I just couldn’t get past that, and it wasn’t really working.”
Six weeks into recipe testing, on a day when her motivation was especially low, she called one of her best friends, director Michael Gracey. He suggested she give herself a complete break, do something that made her feel good, and then go back to it.
“So, I did that, and the next day I woke up and I was like, ‘Ah, I actually think the dough recipe is the problem. It’s not the techniques that I’m testing. It’s actually what I’m working with to start with.’ The dough works when you’ve got a commercial laminator and all of the equipment we’ve got at Lune. So, I started to do research into how to make the dough more extensible and fell down the rabbit hole of reading about pre-ferments, which we don’t use at Lune.”
(A pre-ferment is a portion of dough made in advance of the final dough. There are many different types, including sourdough starter, biga and sponge.)
Reid landed on the pre-ferment with the highest hydration, a poolish, and it worked perfectly the first time. The croissant dough was stretchier, making it easier to roll out by hand. The poolish also enhanced the flavour of the finished croissants, giving them a nutty tang you might associate with a slice of sourdough bread.
“I didn’t want to assume — and this is a very engineering thing — although it had worked once, I was like, ‘It could have been a fluke. So, let’s recipe-test this a couple of times just to get confirmation.’ And it kept working.”
https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/fingerBunInline.jpg?quality="90&strip=all&w=576&sig=gYiUxUwyURZImpeN3POg5g 2x" height="1250" loading="lazy" src="https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/fingerBunInline.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=288&sig=azi7KxYVWY9OcFK3tt0JgA" width="1000"/>
After detailing how to make the raw pastry and create the layers (a three-day process resulting in four mini batches, each yielding five to eight pastries, depending on the style), Reid demonstrates the different shapes, each with a series of step-by-step photos: croissant, pain au chocolat, danish, escargot and kouign-amann, torsade and cruffin (Reid’s way of using up pastry trim). More than 60 recipes for a decade’s worth of Lune favourites follow, such as the distinctly Australian cheese and Vegemite escargot, the ever-popular lemon curd cruffin, and the Macca Sacca, a day-old croissant filled with macadamia frangipane and salted caramel.
The Macca Sacca was one of the first, but they’ve gone on to create hundreds of twice-baked pastries in the style of almond croissants at Lune. As with the other twice-baked recipes in the book, some of the desserts, and the final chapter dedicated to leftovers, you don’t need to make croissants from scratch to experience it. Simply pick up pastries at your local bakery.
Arriving at the idea of using day-old croissants to make twice-baked pastries other than the classic almond croissant (filled with conventional frangipane, or almond custard) had the added benefit of greatly expanding their product lineup, says Reid, and the concept has since travelled well beyond Australia. “All over the world now, people are making twice-baked croissants that aren’t just almond, and I know that that didn’t exist before Lune, and that blows my mind. And people are making cruffins, and a cruffin wasn’t a thing before I came up with it in 2012.”
Lune: Croissants All Day, All Night “was a real celebration of looking at the journey of the last 10 years of Lune,” adds Reid. “I fell in love with the croissant all over again.” At the beginning, she didn’t anticipate that her one-person, wholesale micro bakery would become a five-location, world-renowned croissanterie, and that she would be removed from the day-to-day process that she loves.
“I love working with my hands and creating. And I don’t really do that these days, because if I muscle my way in there, I’m taking that opportunity away from talented, skilled chefs that have chosen to work at Lune.”
Reid’s lifelong passion for Formula One shaped what Lune has become. The design of a race car changes on a daily basis, she says, and the team is always looking ahead to the next race. If the track is tight and twisty or wide with long straights, the car’s aero package changes drastically. “You’re constantly tweaking and trying to improve the performance of the car, and that’s what we’re doing at Lune as well. So, it’s this moving target where I don’t think we’ll ever create the perfect croissant at Lune because that’s unachievable. But if you’re always aiming to get there, then you can continue to push the quality and the experience of what a croissant can be.”
Post a Comment