Making Kosher (dairy!) Croissants – A baking dream come true
Most of the baking I do is pareve, and usually, I don’t mind. But sometimes, I come across a baking or bread idea that absolutely must use dairy. Must must must. No substitutions. Naomi Rivka is taking a baking course right now and she bakes a lot of dairy. She’ll bring home the recipe and excitedly ask, “Can we make this for Shabbos?” And I look at the kilo of butter or whatever in the ingredients and say, “Not this week, we’re having fleishiks…” She keeps saying we can use margarine instead, and my standard line for this is: “Margarine is NOT pareve butter.” I think you’ll agree. Margarine can be USEFUL in kosher baking, but it most definitely isn’t butter. And when what you want is the flavour of butter – there’s nothing like it in the world – then what you need to start with is… butter. Like croissants. I read about making croissants years and years ago. You take a super-thin layer of butter, sandwich it between super-thin layers of dough, and then fold and f