Lune Croissanterie celebrates croissants of the highest calibre
Baker Kate Reid brings a unique blend of art and science to her take on the croissant. Her delectable twists on the classic French pastry have an avid following and in a new book she tells you how to do it.
Perfecting the croissant has taken Kate Reid years. The founder of Lune Croissanterie has been producing what The New York Times called some of the world’s best buttery, flakey morsels for more than a decade. She now has stores in Melbourne and Brisbane, and is soon to open in Sydney.
For the former aerospace engineer who once designed Formula One race cars for a living, it is all about precision – from the climate-controlled glass cube she works within in Fitzroy to get exactly the right temperature, to the machines used to laminate the dough to create exactly the right number of layers.
So what happened when Reid was asked to write her first cookbook and come up with a croissant recipe that anyone can follow at home without using said equipment? Many, many, many failed attempts.
“I was getting Lune to make a couple of extra kilos of dough every day so I could practice at home and I had great ideas,” Reid tells WISH. “But after about six weeks of daily testing of these new ideas, I wasn’t making any headway, and I was basically felt like I was beating my head against the wall. The difficulty was rolling out the dough, because when you use a rolling pin instead of a laminator, you impart strength to the dough. This increases the gluten and makes it spring back. So when you are telling the home baker to roll the dough out to a certain dimension and thickness, it is damn near impossible to do it with a rolling pin.”
So Reid stopped, took a break, and applied her engineering brain to the problem. And she came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the home baker or the rolling pin she had to fix, it was the dough.
She threw herself into research (“I went really deep on dough science”) and discovered that she could use a preferment (a portion of dough made several hours in advance of mixing the final dough) that would increase its extensibility and the ability to be rolled out.
“So I tried it and it worked the first time,” she recalls. “I sent it to my publisher Eve [in London] and she said she was going to try it, and I kept getting WhatsApp messages throughout the night saying ‘it’s easy. Croissants shouldn’t be this easy. Why is it so easy?’ So I think I cracked the code with the dough.”
Next came the process itself, and then the ingredients used. Reid says the recipe is not the traditional French technique and includes using clarified butter as well as normal butter, adding the butter in two stages and taking three days from the first preferment (called a poolish) to the baking.
“Let me pre-warn you – it is not for the faint-hearted,” she writes in her book, titled Lune. “It requires time, preparation, patience, and commitment to following the process. The method I outline, step by step, is highly unorthodox, but I promise you it will result in a great end product.”
Reid wanted to clearly explain the process and she did this by photographing every single step, no matter how small, so that the home baker would know exactly what to do and be able to identify anything that went wrong. There ended up being five pages of photographs of more than 30 steps. “I wanted someone to feel like I was in their kitchen while they were doing it,” she explains of her decision to detail absolutely everything. “As an amateur cook at home, when we pick up the book from a chef who is famous and renowned for being very, very good at something, we try their recipe and sometimes we fail because we don’t have the skill and expertise they do to succeed. I wanted this book to be different; it’s like I am literally holding your hand through the process.”
After spending the first 30-plus pages of the book on how to master croissant dough, Reid then has 60 different recipes on how to use it. Each chapter is split into breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner (yes, you read that right, croissants for dinner!), desserts, twice-baked and leftovers. The baker-now-author offers up many favourites served at Lune, as well as other unique creations.
There are the traditional pastries such as the croissant itself, pain au chocolat and escargots, but then there’s the Lune take on these: a Vegemite and cheese croissant; a pain au Reese (inspired by the American combination of peanut butter and chocolate); a strawberry and miso Danish; and a lamington cruffin (a croissant/muffin hybrid). There are pulled pork croissants for dinner and a pear tarte tartin for dessert. Then there are the twice-baked croissants, including a carrot cake version.
“Carrot cake is my favourite cake on the planet. That is all,” Reid writes in the introduction to this recipe. “No jokes, I do have more to say about carrot cake. Not all carrot cakes are created equal. I’m pretty opinionated on my dos and don’ts of carrot cake. Do include walnuts … do not include raisins (or dried fruit of any form for that matter). It’s ALL about the cream cheese icing. I’ve met one person in my life who prefers carrot cake without cream cheese icing. We’re not friends anymore.”
It is pretty clear when reading Reid’s book that she not only enjoyed creating the recipes but also the writing, which was all done during Melbourne’s big lockdown in 2021. “I don’t think this book could have come at a better time in my life, because due to lockdown, I wasn’t full time on production and I was working from home,” she says. “I had a new 7m long terrazzo bench in my kitchen – perfect to recipe test.”
Given Reid’s fondness for carrot cake (also a favourite of mine), we discuss at length what goes into making the best version, share recipes, and spend a thoroughly delightful hour chatting about where to find fabulous sweet things. We talk as we taste test the famous iced finger bun at Humble Bakery in Sydney’s Surry Hills. It is one of Reid’s favourites, especially with its generous slice of butter in the middle. A lamington also gets spilt into two and shared: “Oh this is delicious,” she says.
Reid started Lune with her brother Cameron back at a tiny hole-in-the-wall location in Melbourne’s Elwood in 2012 and WISH previously interviewed her just as Lune was taking off back in 2018. They now have three stores in Melbourne (Fitzroy, Melbourne CBD and the most recent opening in Armadale), and two in Brisbane and they plan to open their first outpost in Sydney in 2023.
“I am really excited about it,” she says about the store, which will be in Darlinghurst. “There are a lot of people waiting for us to open up here but I don’t want to just come here and expect that people will immediately embrace us. It is about us becoming part of the Darlinghurst food community, the Sydney hospitality community, and collaborating with some of Sydney’s best.”
Reid is also eyeing off going beyond our borders. “Nobody was celebrating croissants in the way Lune does before Lune,” she says, after our second coffee, possibly to offset all the sugar we have eaten. “And now it’s become a global phenomenon to use croissant pastry in exciting and experimental ways. I would love to go overseas and get that acknowledgment that what we are doing with croissant pastry is of the highest calibre it’s exciting and ultimately very delicious.”
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