The World's Most Perfect Croissant is in...Melbourne?

“It should be totally a celebration of butter. You should be able to bite into it and immediately taste the origin of that butter. It should be light as a cloud. It should be delicate and flaky. The outside of the crust should be golden. And when you bite into it, beautiful big delicate shards of pastry should fall onto your plate so that there’s a massive amount of beautiful crumbs that you can lick off your finger and scoop them all up.”

That’s Kate Reid, croissant-whisperer of Lune, the world-famous Melbourne croissanteries , on her favorite pastry.

In L.A. recently to celebrate her first cookbook, also named Lune, Kate got to croissant Valhalla by way of a circuitous route. She’d been an Aerospace Engineer for Formula One racing when she stepped into a Paris boulangerie and tasted the croissant that changed her life. What followed was a fascinating journey into the intricate process of making a pastry that we rarely wonder about. After apprenticing at Du Pain et des Idees in Paris. she returned to Melbourne determined to open her own bakery, quickly signing a lease on her first shop and spending her life savings on equipment. Sitting alone in the brand new empty bakery one morning, she realized she knew—maybe 10%--of how to actually make the perfect croissant. Once she got over the shock, Kate resurrected herself the only way she knew how: by applying her Formula One brain to the problem.

“It’s not like I designed a croissant, then tested it in a wind tunnel,” she said. “It’s not as linear as that… But with croissants, there’s just dozens and dozens of parts of the recipe that are actually open to critical analysis. The recipe might have been slowly evolving for a couple hundred years, but essentially the technique that was created by someone back in Austria originally, and then came to France when Marie Antoinette married the French King and took her pastry chef with her, that technique hasn’t changed very much because it’s always been master baker passing it down to apprentice. As far as the apprentice is concerned, that recipe is law, and that’s how you made croissants but, when I got back from Paris and realized I knew only about 10%...I couldn’t afford to just leave and go back to pastry school (so)….I imagined my perfect end product and started working backwards.”

Over the course of about a week, she changed one variable at a time, eventually bringing down her oven degrees and lengthening the proofing stage. In the end the croissants she pulled out of the prover were “perfectly puffy.”

“It was like they’d been 3D printed,” Kate said. “Not a single drop of melted butter came out of them, and the surface had stopped being wrinkly and sweaty and was now fully plumped out, and I said to myself, ‘okay, these look kind of amazing.’ I egg-washed them and put them in the oven and they baked up better than anything I’d ever seen in my life, including in Paris.”

The lines at Lune’s locations start early, very early, before the bakeries sell out. Her croissants have been praised by Nigella Lawson. Yotam Ottolenghi and Rene Redzepi, as well as The Guardian and the New York Times, among many others, and now her cookbook shares her secret sauce. It’s a technical book with instructions like ‘set your alarm for 2 am,’ but Kate also wrote it on many levels. She included “all the verbal and visual cues” to make a perfect croissant, and yet there’s also a Twice-Baked chapter, where you can source your own from a fabulous bakery like Gjusta or Republique, and add the fillings Lune is famous for.

Of course, we’ve never tasted one of these beauties, but we’re crossing our fingers that Kate will open a Lune in L.A. Watch for this Twice-Baked Persian Love Cake recipe in our upcoming Spring issue, or make your own perfect croissants at home. Order the book from Now Serving here.