Name: How 21,000 Croissants Are Made In A Legendary New York Bakery Every Week | Big Batches
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T06:10:52.000Z
Duration: 12 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Advanced passive voice

This massive amount of dough is about to be cut, folded, and rolled into 2,100 croissants.

But making perfect croissants on this scale is easier said than done.

For executive chef Natalie Abrams, it's a constant race against time and changing temperatures.

If our dough is mixed incorrectly, if it's over-mixed, if it's under-mixed, if it's mixed too warm, if anything goes wrong, you see it immediately.

We visited Colson Patisserie in Brooklyn, New York, to see how it prepares its croissants in such big batches.

Five gallons of milk and buckets of ice water are added into the mixer first.

And basically, we adjust over the summer how much ice is going into that water.

If it's in the dead of winter and the kitchen is freezing, then we maybe put the water a little bit warmer.

Keeping the dough cold is an essential part of slowing down the fermentation process.

Next, an entire tray of wild sourdough starter is scraped into the mix.

It helps our croissant grow a little bit bigger.

And then we mix that around for a little bit to sort of combine, let everything start to bloom.

After a short spin, 250 pounds of flour is gradually added so it doesn't overwhelm the mixer and send flour into the air.

They also add in a container of sugar and salt before continuing the mixing process.

And we mix maybe for another two, three minutes.

So here, we're just starting to wait for a little bit of gluten development.

And then we start adding butter since that's sort of a hydrating thing and it inhibits gluten development.

So that's why we hold that till the end of the mix.

And lastly, dough scrap or pâte fermentée is combined.

This helps as a flavor enhancer because it has a more mature flavor.

Once the dough has been properly mixed, the entire mixer is lifted so Natalie can easily transfer portions of dough to the prep table.

After the mix, we start to try and slow down any warmth or fermentation that happens.

So we try and take it as fast as possible out of the bowl into the freezer to really sort of put a pause on the fermentation process.

The mixed dough is then cut, weighed, and wrapped as quickly as possible.

It's important that the starter that's going in doesn't have much of a chance to do much, that the yeast going in is all gonna save all of its energy for the final bake.

And so that's why we want to try and work as quickly as possible with this process so that way we can get it cold, cold, cold.

When all of the dough is wrapped, it's carted into a blast freezer.

The dough is gonna stay in here for about two to three hours until it's pretty solid, until we really are sure that we've stopped that fermentation from the heat.

And then we're gonna move it into the fridge where it is going to stay overnight to relax, let the flavor develop a little bit, and hydrate all of the dough.

In another room, workers begin unwrapping mountains of butter.

And we use a European-style 83% Vermont yeast butter.

We've tasted a bunch of other stuff, but this, for us, has been the main ingredient for some of our biggest flavors.

This will get us through about a day and a half worth of croissant production just for the actual sheets that we want to put inside.

All of this butter needs to be layered with dough.

But instead of rolling it out into sheets,

Then, basically, it goes into a hydraulic press, so it becomes pliable but not warm.

We want the butter and the dough to be as even in temperature as possible, so that's why we have to basically use what we pressed out of the butter the same day, so that way we know that our temperature is close.

The relaxed dough is now ready to be stretched and layered with these sheets of butter in a process known as lamination.

First, the dough needs to be stretched to the same thickness and width as the sheet of butter, so it can be completely folded over.

So, basically, here we just take our butter that's a little pliable, but not soft, and we're going to just make sure that all of the dough has a layer of butter.

And then, after this, we begin putting in our series of folds.

After the folds, each sheet will have 24 layers of dough and butter, and it's these layers that will give the croissants their honeycomb interior and flaky texture when baked.

But if the temperature is off at any stage, they risk losing the entire batch.

If you have butter that is too cold, then the butter shatters, and then you'll see little bits and pieces of butter throughout the dough, and you won't have any layers.

If you have dough that is too cold, it rips.

If it's not laminated correctly, if the butter is broken, then it comes out with 50 or 60 croissants that we can't really use.

When the dough has been laminated, it's wrapped and stored in a proofer at 55 degrees for a few hours.

At this temperature, the dough and butter remain pliable without fermenting, which is essential for the next step.

Now it's time to stretch the laminated pieces of dough.

For this step, the bakery uses an automatic sheeter that stretches and cuts the dough into triangles.

So we have about 7 kilos of dough here, which is about 14 pounds.

Each one of those makes about 60 croissants, and so every day we're going through approximately 60 to 70 of these laminated pieces of dough.

So we have a specific program for all of our different croissants.

This passes through about seven times, and then here we have some of the scrap dough coming off of the sides, and then all of our triangles are ready.

Even though they're very close here to being super-duper consistent, we still are weighing each piece that we make to make sure that we have everything coming out at exactly pretty much the same weight.

We have about a 3-gram spread on all of our croissants, which means that all of our 3,000 croissants come out around the same size, the same shape, because croissants really show every single imperfection or perfection.

The triangles are then ready to be rolled into their crescent shape.

So after the dough has been weighed, we basically straighten out to make a nice straight triangle.

We give it a little bump to give it a place to sort of live, and then we have a nice one-two motion where we basically put the croissant right in its home.

So after that, it gets moved to the tray, and we give it a nice little tap.

You kind of have to tap all your croissants to show them that you love them.

The rolled croissants are then left to rest for another 8 to 10 hours and proofed for another 5 to 6 hours.

But even at this step, slight changes in temperature can ruin the entire batch.

Natalie gives each of them a squeeze to make sure they're proofed enough.

If it feels tight here, then we let them go for a little bit longer.

If it feels pretty even, then we know that we're good to go on the proof.

Some of them that you can see got a little close to the oven while they were proofing, and so we have a couple that the butter just started leaking out because they got a little too warm.

But that's how sensitive these croissants are.

Like, if it's a slight, like 6 inches too close to an oven, then it's probably just gonna have to go to staff meal because you're gonna see it when it comes out that it's gonna have sort of that butter underneath.

That means there's less butter in the croissant.

Here, Natalie is finishing off each croissant with a coat of vegetable spray.

So it's like a vegetable protein that does a very nice job of still giving us that color and shine.

The loaded rack is then carted into this massive oven.

So this is our oven that's programmed with our croissants recipe.

We have everything sort of set up for, again, maximum consistency on the bake.

It can adjust the venting, it can adjust steam, and it can decrease our temperature as needed.

Inside, the oven can bake 360 croissants at a time.

That raises, lifting the cart off the ground, and then once I hit Start Bake, it starts rotating this rack around for the most even bake possible.

And sort of the hot air is coming out of convection vents that line this entire side.

And so, again, all of those are adjusted individually.

I think there's about 200 or something to adjust for the perfect airflow to make sure that the bake from top to bottom on the oven is happening in a very even way.

After about 25 minutes, the baked croissants are taken out and left to cool.

Normally, you stand back when we open this, let the steam out a little bit.

If they're packed too soon, the center of the croissant will collapse.

If you're really paying attention, it shows you everything that's happened in terms of, like, all the attention to detail, all the technical details, all the attention to detail, all the technique that has gone into it.

While most of these croissants are headed to wholesale customers,

Colson also sells some of these croissants at two cafes.

Our goal is really just to, like, have all of these multitudes of customers who are walking into different shops across New York walk away with a pastry that they're happy with and that they find some joy in and then make everybody's day a little better.