Learning to Make Croissants with Mille-Feuille Bakery

I recently had the pleasure of attending a fun croissant making class at Mille-Feuille Bakery in Greenwich Village, and I wanted to tell you all about it!

I knew when Nate and I moved to the area that I would want to take advantage of all of the wonderful bakeries that would be nearby in the city. Mille-Feuille is one of them. It’s your classic French bakery complete with croissants, macarons, baguette, mille-feuilles, tarts, and more.

I was stoked when I found out that they did baking classes, so I checked them out immediately. They do one for macarons, one for croissants, one for mille-feuilles, and one for éclairs. I was on a real macaron-making kick when I found out about the classes (still am!) but ultimately decided to do croissants — because when am I going to teach myself that??

Anyway, so I signed up months ago and finally got to attend the class last weekend 🙂

Apparently croissant making is actually a three-day process—at least for this bakery, it is. Here are the abbreviated instructions:

Day 1: Make the dough by mixing all purpose flour, sugar, salt, butter, fresh yeast, whole milk, and vanilla. Wrap the dough and let it set overnight in the fridge.

Day 2: Roll out the dough and set a large square of butter on top of it. Fold the dough around the butter and roll out the dough. Fold again. Let the dough set again in the fridge.

Day 3: Roll out the dough and cut into triangles. Roll them into croissants and set them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Proof, then brush the tops with egg yolks. Then bake until a semi-dark golden brown.

Now that you know a little bit about the process, these pictures will have some context…

That’s Jean-Denis, our teacher. (Thanks for creeping, Nate.) His French accent made my francophile heart so happy!

These are Nate’s croissants. They turned out the best in the class!

One day, I will be able to make croissants that look like this. Doesn’t that almond blueberry croissant on the right look amazing??

Don’t mind me while I eat all thirty croissants that Nate and I went home with!

Anyway, this was so much fun! If you’re ever in Manhattan, I highly recommend taking one of Mille-Feuille’s classes!