Make quicker croissants

Instead of days-long processes, this recipe requires a few hours

I said that I had seen some recipes claiming you can make croissants in just four hours. I scoffed, dismissively. Everyone knows the best croissants take three days to make.

She said nothing. She said nothing very loudly.

You have a way to make croissants in just four hours? I asked.

She said she did. And since she is Helen Fletcher, the pastry chef at Tony’s in St. Louis, I took her seriously.

It turns out she knows how to make croissants in just four hours. Actually, what she knows is how to make laminated dough in four hours, and that is the most time-consuming part of croissants.

Laminated doughs are doughs for puff pastries and croissants that bake up into dozens of delicate, crisp, buttery layers. They almost shatter into a cloud of pastry dust in your mouth when you bite into them.

The traditional way to make them is to roll out a sheet of dough and cover it with a cool-but-pliable sheet of butter. You then fold those sheets into thirds, like a letter, chill it so the butter does not melt, roll it and fold it into thirds again, chill it again, fold it into thirds, chill and, if you have the time and patience, fold and chill one more time.

A faster and easier way, with results that are nearly as good, involves shredding frozen butter over the initial sheet of dough before folding and optionally chilling several times (you don’t have to refrigerate it if you can work fast enough). This method produces what the cheerful folks on “The Great British Baking Show” call “rough puff pastry,” or just “rough puff.”

Fletcher’s method is rougher than rough — that is, it is further from the original concept of laminated doughs. But it is faster and easier and, it turns out, every bit as good.

Fletcher’s method, which she details in her blog Pastries Like a Pro, does not include a thin layer of butter between each thin layer of dough. In regular laminated doughs, the butter steams as it cooks, and the pressure of the steam forces each layer a little bit apart, resulting in beautifully puffed pastry.

Instead, she incorporates the butter into the dough, as you would a flaky pie crust. Because the dough is repeatedly folded over on itself, as with traditional laminated doughs, you still end up with all of the exquisite layers that you would find in other croissants and puff pastries.