The croissant.
Whether you like yours plain,
smothered in jam...
..or even filled with ham and cheese,
this French classic is a British favourite.
Helping to put a smile on our faces at breakfast time.
Every year, we tear our way through a quarter of a billion of them.
Satisfying that demand requires baking on a massive scale,
and to find out how it's done, I've come to their spiritual home -
France.
To one of the biggest croissant factories in the world!
316 people work here,
producing a staggering 18,000 croissants every hour.
I'm Gregg Wallace...
That is fantastic.
That is a massage parlour for croissants.
..and I'm discovering the culinary care that goes into our daily bread.
It's a big, sticky chewing gum!
I'm Cherry Healey.
You could hurt someone with those.
And I'm pulling back the layers of this flaky pastry.
I can see how that's the perfect thing for a croissant.
I couldn't eat the whole pot, though!
And historian Ruth Goodman...
That looks quite croissanty to me! Yes.
But actually it's not. It's not a croissant? No.
..is investigating the croissant's surprising origins.
Oh, that's so much more dense.
Over the next 24 hours, this factory will produce
a staggering 336,000 croissants.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Brioche Pasquier factory near the city of Valence
in south-east France.
This 5.5 acre site produces seven different types
of pastries and brioche, churning out
more than 500 million of them every year.
They ship to 20 different countries.
Supplying brioche to Belgium and pain au lait to Portugal.
But we're following production of one of their most popular
UK exports, their six-pack of butter croissants.
Production begins at the intake area with a delivery of beurre.
No, I'm not cold, that's just French for butter.
As the first pallet comes off the lorry,
our production process begins.
To find out what happens next,
I'm meeting the company's CEO, Pascal Pasquier.
You are Pascal? Yeah.
Gregg. Good morning. Good morning, Gregg, nice to meet you.
This is the very start of your croissant production, right? Yeah.
How much butter is on there?
In this lorry, we have around 21 tonnes of butter.
How many croissants would that make?
4 million. 4 million.
4 million croissants.
Can I look at the butter? Yeah, of course!
Of course.
Each one of these pallets holds 80 10-kilo blocks.
Wow.
How important is butter with a croissant?
What does it give?
With this butter is the taste.
So, no butter, no croissant, right?
No butter, no croissant.
That seems to me to be very dark.
What butter is this?
This butter is concentrate butter.
This concentrated butter has a fat content of 99.8%,
nearly 20% higher than the stuff in your fridge.
If it's got more fat, it's got less water, right?
Yeah. Why do you want less water?
Because, for the shelf life.
Ah! Because we produce without preservative.
I'm not a scientist, but the bacteria would be
in the water. Yeah.
And that's what would make the croissant go off?
That's it.
This special butter helps to give our croissants a shelf life
of up to 29 days.
Before entering the factory, every delivery is checked to ensure
it's the perfect temperature.
Pascal, what temperature do you want?
Maximum, 16 degrees.
What happens if it goes above 16?
It will melt!
Oh, of course. Yeah!
And it doesn't work.
It doesn't work any more!
Sorry. Pardon.
I know, I know, give me a break, will you!
Until the butter is needed on the production line,
it's stored at a cool 15 degrees Celsius,
in one of 18 giant refrigerators.
This butter doesn't just look different to the stuff we spread
on our toast, how it's made is pretty different, too,
as Cherry's finding out.
It's no secret that all butter begins with just one ingredient -
milk.
I'm in North Wales meeting dairy farmer, John Roberts.
Hi, farmer John, lovely to meet you. And you.
And, of course, his herd of nearly 200 cows.
These are Holstein Friesians.
Is that a special cow?
Do they produce especially rich milk?
No, it's just standard, about 4% fat milk.
All cow's milk is a mixture of fat, protein, carbohydrates and water.
It's how it's processed that determines what kind
of butter it becomes.
How much milk do you produce a day?
Between 5,500 and 6,000 litres go in a day.
How much of that goes on to make concentrated butter?
All of it. Every single drop? Yeah.
It's taken by tanker 30 miles down the road to Meadow Foods dairy,
where I'm meeting site director Karl Sears.
Hi, Karl. Lovely to meet you. Hi, Cherry, lovely to meet you, too.
So, I've just seen the farm, I want to know how you turn
that milk into concentrated butter.
OK, let me show you. Thank you.
The first step in making any kind of butter
is separating the cream from the milk.
I've never seen so many pipes.
It helps if you're a plumber!
Where is the milk?
The milk is coming through the pipework into three separators.
Now, those enable us to separate 100,000 litres of whole milk
an hour into skim and cream.
Each separator consists of a centrifuge,
spinning at 4,000 rpm.
As the liquid enters through a pipe in the bottom,
the heavier milk is forced to the outside and syphoned off.
While the lighter cream is sucked out of a pipe at the top.
1,000 litres of milk produces 100 litres of cream.
So, after separation, this is the cream.
Look at it. It's so thick.
What's the fat content of this now?
The fat content of that cream is 40%.
It's similar to the double cream that you'd buy in the supermarket.
The skimmed milk goes away for ingredients into things
like yoghurt or ice cream.
It's from this point on that the process of making
concentrated butter differs from making standard butter.
All right.
Instead of churning the cream until it solidifies,
we're going to concentrate the fat.
The 40% cream comes into here, it's pasteurised, and the first real
stage of the concentration process is here,
on this centrifugal separator.
Another whizz in a centrifuge removes water and protein,
and takes our cream from 40% fat to a belt-busting 70%.
This is a sample of the 70% fat, so you can see how much thicker
that is than the cream we originally separated.
Oh, that is delicious.
But this cream still isn't fatty enough.
Next, it flows into a machine called a homogeniser,
where pistons smash open the outer shell of each cream cell,
releasing the liquid fat inside.
Any remaining milk protein is then removed in another
centrifuge, leaving us with butter oil,
containing 99.8% dairy fat.
So, from that, 70% fat, to that, I was expecting it to be
like solid butter, but it looks more like vegetable oil.
It's dairy fat, in an oil state.
Finally, our butter oil travels to the packing room,
cooling as it goes from 50 degrees Celsius to 20.
So, as it's going into the box, it starts to solidify,
so, at this point in the box, it's like a tooth paste consistency.
Before my eyes it's becoming solid, I mean, look at that.
It tastes like butter that needs a bit of salt. Yeah, very much.
I can see how that's the perfect, perfect thing for a croissant.
Yeah. I couldn't eat the whole pot, though.
It takes just 60 seconds for the butter oil to solidify
into a bright yellow block.
So, there we go.
A giant slab of concentrated butter.
I have to say, that is one of the most complicated
scientific processes I have ever seen.
Back over in France, our butter is still chilling out
in the fridge.
So, I'm off to the propagation room, which I am led to believe holds
the factory's most prized possession.
The person I'm here to see is research and development manager,
Lor Corbelle.
Hello.
Hi. Where are we? What is this?
We are in the levain room.
Levain? Levain.
That means the wine.
Oh, it is the same pronunciation, but we don't put wine
in our croissant dough.
What is levain?
It's a mother dough.
Right. OK.
All bakers have kind of like a mother dough
that all baking starts with.
Exactly, exactly. So, what is it exactly, tell me?
So, levain is a natural dough that contains yeast,
bacterias...
And what does that do?
This is like a concentrated flavour for our product.
That looks like normal dough.
This is dough that we are going to add to our croissant dough,
for the flavour, just like a stock cube.
Yes. As strange as it sounds, this flavour-packed dough
will be fed into the main dough mix further down the line,
helping to give our croissants their unique taste.
If this has got all the flavour, right... Yes.
..why don't you make the croissants out of this dough?
Oh. Because this would be too strong.
The microorganisms, the yeast and bacterias develops
and creates this very acid taste and this,
you can smell.
This smells like acid.
Yeah, that is acidic.
So, a little pinch of this goes a long, long way. Yes.
A very, very long way indeed.
Just one of these 12-kilo boxes is enough
to flavour 3,000 croissants.
Like a beloved household pet, this living organism needs regular
feeding to keep it alive, so it gets a generous daily ration
of flour and water.
That means that every croissant made here can get its flavour
from the same levain.
Where did the original levain come from?
The original levain came from Gabriel.
The father of Pascal.
Whoa! One minute, one minute, one minute.
One minute.
Pascal, who I met earlier?
His father made the original one of these?
Yes, in 1936.
So, every day, since 1936,
you take from the levain,
to give flavour, and then you put some flour and water
back in to make it grow again? Yes.
And then you take it and then you put back in again.
Every day? Every day.
Since 1936?
That's crazy!
And it will never die?
As long as you make croissants, it will always stay alive?
Yes, as long as we take care of this, refreshing it every day.
How many boxes of that levain do I need?
Oh, we need two boxes of these to make a new batch of croissants.
That's 6,000 croissants, but nobody told me I would be doing
the heavy lifting.
Good thing I'm in peak physical condition.
That's really heavy, can you manage? Yes.
We're now 30 minutes in and with 24 kilos of freshly fermented levain,
we're heading from propagation to the mixing room...
Down there?
..where we're going to make a 300-kilo batch of croissant dough.
Right. Here? Here.
Right, what are we looking at?
So, here, this is the mixing area.
Right. So what goes in first?
Levain. Levain? Yes. Shall I? Shall I do it? Yes.
Crikey!
Oh, my God!
This is hard work.
First, we need to coax our two helpings of levain
out of their cosy containers.
It's a big, sticky chewing gum!
Yeah!
Perfect.
And then you have the fresh yeast.
Our levain already has some yeast in it,
but we need to add a little extra into the mix to help the dough rise.
And, after that, something I definitely wasn't expecting.
Right, now, that is a lot of ice.
That's a lot of ice.
If you had asked me to list all the ingredients in a croissant,
ice would never have made the list.
The ice is added for the temperature.
Why do you want it cold?
The dough needs to be cold, because you never want the butter
to melt, so, the dough needs to be cold.
But there's still no butter in sight, and that's not
the only thing missing.
Like a fairground teacup ride, my mixing bowl is spun
around into position under the blender.
Here, 50 litres of water, along with 150 kilos of plain flour,
30 kilos of sugar, and 10 kilos of rapeseed oil drops down the chute
and the whole lot gets whisked together.
Sugar just for sweetness, right?
Yes. Flavour, sweetness.
What's the oil for?
Oil is for softness,
and it also really helps for the dough to be workable.
All right, we've got sugar, we've got rapeseed oil to make
it workable, we're now getting together a dough.
Yes. Now what happens?
The most important ingredients are flour and water,
because flour and water are going to combine together
and create gluten.
On its own, flour is surprisingly gluten-free,
but when you add water and start to make a dough,
two proteins in the flour, glutenin and gliadin fuse together
to form gluten.
What does gluten do?
The gluten is like a network, and it's going to hold
the gas bubble produced by the yeast, and that is going to help
for the croissant to rise.
After a 20 minute spin at 85 rpm, all the ingredients
in my 300-kilo mix have combined into dough, and we have created
that vital gluten network.
That's our dough. That's our dough.
What happens to it now?
So, now, the dough needs to rest for about one hour.
One hour!
I don't even get that for lunch!
Why has it got to rest for one hour?
So, at this step, the gluten needs to relax.
I don't know if you can see how it breaks easily.
And you need it to be more springy.
We need it to be more stretchy, to be more workable afterwards.
Is it a bit like us, if we have a tough day at work?
We're like this... It's exactly the same. And we need to go...
Exactly.
After its rigorous work-out in the mixer,
our dough is settling in for some well deserved R and R.
Meanwhile, Ruth is in Paris,
investigating where our passion for this pastry began.
Ah, what could be more French
than cycling along the River Seine?
And if there's one food that is quintessentially French,
it's the croissant.
But how did these pastries become icons of French cuisine?
Loic. Ruth.
Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
Helping me uncover the origins of the croissant
is food historian Loic Bienassis.
So, what on Earth is the history of the croissant?
Actually, that's a tricky question.
However, we may have one link and that is this one.
Oh! Well, that looks quite croissanty to me. Yes.
But, actually, it's not. It's not a croissant?
No, it is an Austrian pastry.
Kipferl. A kipferl. That's right.
Oh, it doesn't feel like a croissant, it is much more solid.
It's more like a shortcrust. The croissant, as you know,
is more a puff pastry.
You can check.
Oh, that's so much more dense.
Yeah, precisely. Completely different inside.
More like a bread.
Oh, it is, it's not even sweet.
Actually, it seems to have played an important role in the history
of the French croissant.
Legend has it that Austrian bakers invented the kipferl in 1683
to commemorate a heroic victory over the armies
of the Ottoman Empire.
The shape of these pastries was supposedly a mocking reference
to the crescent on their enemy's flag.
But how on Earth, then, did this Austrian pastry
end up in Paris?
I can tell you the story, actually.
It took place not far from here.
Loic is taking me on a stroll
into the bustling city centre to see where it all began.
You see?
In front of us, you have the 92 Rue De Richelieu,
and, at this very place,
we have this Boulangerie Viennoise.
Ah! A Viennese bakery!
Precisely. First opened in 1838.
But it's not here any more, of course.
So, there was a Viennese bakery just there.
Boulangerie Viennoise brought the Austrian fashion for luxurious
pastries, including kipferls, to Cosmopolitan 1830s Paris.
When did the kipferl become French?
So, we have this 1853 recipe.
It's the first time you have a pastry called
a croissant in France.
So, 15 years after the bakery opened, the name croissant,
which simply means crescent, made its first appearance.
And is this a recipe that is the modern croissant?
No. No, it's not, because, for instance, you have no butter.
Ah!
This 19th century croissant was still closer to the Austrian
kipferl than the modern pastry.
So, we've got that shape in 1838,
then we get the name in 1853.
Right.
But when is the modern croissant born?
We have another recipe here which is a first
we have of the modern croissant.
Right. Published in 1906.
Oh, so, 20th century? Yes, 20th century.
And that is the very first time we have the modern croissant.
So, bit by bit, we have these Austrian ancestors
that arrive in Paris, give us the shape, then we get
the name, and, then, finally,
the recipe developed in the late 19th century?
Exactly.
Nearly 70 years after Boulangerie Viennoise opened,
the modern croissant was born, and, over the following century,
it grew in popularity to become a fundamental part
of French cuisine.
So, the croissant really is French.
Yes, it may have ancestors way back in Austria,
but the modern croissant was developed in Paris.
Although perhaps rather more recently than many of us imagined.
At the factory, the butter for my butter croissants arrived
over two hours ago, and is still in the fridge.
So, while it's been chilling, we've knocked up a 300-kilo lump
of butterless croissant dough,
which has spent the past hour doing very little,
just resting and relaxing.
A bit like me on holiday.
Right.
In the hour that it has rested, what has happened to it?
The gluten has relaxed.
Now we can see how stretchy it is.
You can feel it.
Not as tight, not as tense.
Not as tight as it was right after the kneading process.
Right, so in there we have, how much?
300 kilos? Yes.
300 kilos, ready to make 6,000 croissants.
6,000 croissants!
You've forgotten something.
What? You have forgotten something. There's no butter.
Oh! Be patient.
The butter is coming afterwards.
Do you even use the butter?
You don't, do you?
My chilled-out dough now gets a rude awakening,
as it's tipped into a giant hopper,
cut into more manageable 10-kilo chunks...
..and rolled out onto a conveyor.
Then, to recover from all that turmoil, it heads to the spa.
That is fantastic.
That is a massage parlour for croissants, right?
Kind of. What is it doing?
This is la tapoteuse.
Tapoteuse. "Tapoter" in French means "gently tap". Tapoteuse.
OK.
So, this machine is spreading the dough gently.
It seems really slow to me.
It is slow because we really want to respect the artisan process.
With this, are you trying to do what a baker would do?
Yes.
That's exactly what the baker would do with his hands.
Simply rolling out the dough now could overwork the gluten
and make for tough croissants.
So, inside the massage parlour, two sets of paddles gently flatten
and squeeze while 11 spinning rollers lovingly
caress out the kinks.
MUSIC: Je T'aime Moi Non Plus by Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin
Only after it's been gently spread out does a giant,
mechanical rolling pin compress it to a thickness of 1.5 centimetres.
I want to be a croissant.
It gets a good life.
It gets lots of sugar, it gets to have a rest,
then it gets a massage.
Later on, it's going to get a suntan.
This is a good life for a croissant.
There still isn't any butter.
Yes, once it's the right thickness, it's time for the butter. Let's go.
Finally! Butter me up!
I've got the butter, Lor. Hey!
At last. Where's it go?
Oh, you can put it up here.
Whoa, that's a lot of butter.
My chilled palette of sunshiny goodness is a perfect
15 degrees Celsius and ready for action.
Perfect, excellent.
Well...
See that, see that - British finesse.
At some stage, you've got to soften this, right,
to mix it with the dough?
Oh, no, we want it hard,
for the butter to become a layer.
My rock-solid chilled butter now makes its way slowly
down through this insatiable machine...
..which chomps through 100 kilos every hour,
and then forces it back out
through a tiny gap just 7.5 millimetres thick
and 22 centimetres wide.
Whoa.
That is one strong machine, because that is rock hard butter, right?
Yes, it's an extruder, so it's two cylinders that extrude
the butter on the dough that we made earlier.
I'm impressed with that. I really am.
And, so, now, that butter now is going in the middle
of wrapped over dough?
Yes, so the dough is going to be folded onto itself.
So, this is our first layer of butter
in between two layers of dough.
The process of sandwiching butter in between dough is known
as lamination, and it's the cornerstone of croissant pastry.
This lamination, how important is this to you here?
So, this is very important to get the flakiness of the croissant,
which is the very famous texture of the croissant,
the French croissant.
Our doughy, buttery sandwich now travels down the line
to the lamination room.
In here, it gets folded again until there are
four separate laminations.
It's then cut into 80 centimetre sheets and sent to the stacker.
Right, what's happening?
So, at this step, the dough has already been folded in order
to get four layers of butter.
And I can actually see the layers there. Yes.
Very, very clearly.
And then it's the final process to get our final number of layers,
which is 12.
Why 12 layers?
12 layers is the best compromise to get the softness of the croissant
and also the flakiness of the dough.
To get that magic number, the stacker simply lays three strips
on top of each other.
So what happens to this now?
Does it get squashed?
No, now the dough needs to rest.
Rest again? Yes.
Because you've worked it so hard, right? Exactly.
To rest up, my laminated dough now heads off on a leisurely
40-minute stroll around the factory.
If you believe the experts, then laminated dough
equals flaky pastry.
But is it really that crucial?
Cherry is investigating.
Look at that.
Soft, crispy and flaky.
Lamination may not sound delicious, but the results most certainly are.
But how does this magical layering process create
the perfect croissant?
The man with the answers is food scientist Dr Stuart Farrimond.
Bonjour! Bonjour.
Bonjour. Nice to see you, Cherry.
We are going to do an experiment.
We are going to make a croissant without the layering,
just as an experiment to see how important the layering is
and why we should do it.
Layer-less croissant.
Somewhere in France, people are crying.
We're working with a standard croissant recipe,
but, instead of making the dough and layering
the butter in afterwards...
Everything in. That's the yeast.
..we're mixing it all in at once.
This is the laziest croissants that have ever been made.
Now you can see it's really wet and it's quite slimy.
Slimy and sticky.
This rich mix is similar to conventional enriched dough.
Excellent.
Oh, look at those. Look at that.
I rolled it out and I shaped them into croissants like that. OK.
No layering at all.
So, in every other way, other than the lack of layering,
that's a croissant? Yes.
I'm really excited to see what they're going to be like.
After 20 minutes in the oven, our all-in-one croissants are ready.
There we go. Look at that.
They're a bit flat.
Not that bad.
CLONK!
You could hurt someone with those.
But it's what's on the inside that counts.
I mean, it's not your normal croissant, that's for sure.
It's very bready. It's very bready.
Very dense. It doesn't have any of that light flakiness.
There's no crispy kind of layers on it.
With no butter layers to separate the dough,
it's all stuck together and we've ended up
with a stodgy kind of scone.
So, how does the layering create that light, fluffy croissant?
Experimenting time. Here we go.
This time, we're sticking with tradition.
We've made the dough first and now we're adding the butter separately.
So, we're making a little butter parcel.
Mine's stuck to the table and yours looks like a nappy.
Three layers of butter.
That's very clever.
My version is staying like this with just three folded layers,
while Dr Stu is following the technique used
in our croissant factory.
I'm going to keep rolling mine until we get to 12 layers. Yes.
And then we're going to see what the difference is.
How come you get 12 layers and I get three? That's just selfish.
Mine's going to be better.
You can really, really see the layers.
In that one, the layers are really thick.
In the 12, they're much thinner. They're tiny, yeah.
So, same amount of butter, but just different effect.
These buttery layers are vital, because they'll provide our dough
with that all-important separation.
First-ever croissant.
There she is.
Cherry, that's amazing.
But what difference will having three or 12 layers make?
In they go.
Who's going to win?
Me.
As the croissants heat up, moisture in the butter and dough
turns to steam, pushing apart the pastry layers,
causing them to rise.
You can smell it, can't you?
They both look pretty good.
Let's see what it looks like.
OK.
That's that one. I'm getting hungry. I know, me, too.
Yours... Oh, yours is so flaky.
Mine was really quite solid to cut, whereas yours almost collapsed,
it was so full of air.
When it goes into the scorching hot oven, the moisture from the butter
and the moisture from the dough rapidly turns into steam
and that forces each layer apart.
That's called pastry lift.
Pastry lift.
The more layers, the more pockets of air form in it,
the higher it rises, and the lighter the texture
and the more flaky the croissant will be.
Because mine's only got three layers, there's only three chances
for it to get some lift.
You can see the difference.
Mine is still tasty and buttery, but it's heavy.
Try this one.
Yours is light and flaky and delicious.
So, the layers are key.
Can you have too many layers?
Yes, because if you have too many layers, it gets too flaky,
and you lose that lovely croissant texture.
So, get the right number of layers, and 12 is a great number.
The French really do know what they're doing,
don't they? The French do know what they're doing.
Forget three, 12 most certainly is the magic number.
Back at the factory, we're nearly 3.5 hours
into the croissant-making process.
My laminated dough with 12 layers of butter
has finished its 40-minute rest
and is now workable enough to hit the production line.
Here, it's rolled to 5-millimetres thick
and has its edges trimmed
ready for the cutter.
Oh, I like that.
I do like those patterns.
I didn't know a croissant started off as a triangle.
It does.
So, this machine will cut the dough into triangles
to get to the final shape to roll the croissant.
And it uses up every single bit of dough.
I love that. Perfectly shaped.
Yes, the triangles are cutting in different directions,
so there is no waste at all.
We are using all the dough.
That's incredible.
Once the mechanical cookie cutter has carved our dough into triangles,
a set of razor-sharp blades slice them into five rows.
A faster moving conveyor then singles them out
and lines them all up in the same direction.
Only then do they disappear
inside the factory's top-secret rolling machine.
So show me, then what this secret machine does.
So, this secret machine rolls 300 croissants per minute.
300 every minute?
Every minute.
I don't think you've got a machine.
I think you actually do them all by hand.
No. That artisan feel.
Going back to the 1930s.
In that room are 100 French bakers rolling.
No?
All right, so, the machine will pick this up to help start the rolling,
and then it will roll
the croissant like this.
Well, let's see how many you can do in ten seconds.
All right. Ready, three, two, one.
Go.
Time out.
You can do one in ten seconds.
The machine is better than you, sorry.
Yes, the machine is better than me.
But this is not too bad.
Well, you can't say I didn't try.
Fortunately, the top-secret machine can roll
a much better croissant than me.
Which is a good thing, because it churns out 18,000 an hour.
That's lovely.
Do you know what I see? No.
I see hundreds and hundreds of breakfasts on their way,
that's what I see.
We're making a batch of 6,000?
Yes. How long will it take for 6,000 croissants to pass through?
It takes about 20 minutes.
These are straight, right?
But croissants are curved.
The ones that are curved are the ones with vegetable oil.
These ones are made of butter, that's why they are straight.
Really? Yes.
I never knew that.
The straight ones have butter, the curved ones have vegetable oil?
Well, in France, traditionally, yes.
If we are visiting France, a straight one will be butter?
Yes. That's brilliant.
I never knew that.
I love it when I learn things like this, I love it.
Now our croissants are subjected to a thorough inspection,
as each one needs to be 11 centimetres long
and between 45g and 46g.
45.9.
Perfect.
Luckily, my batch has passed this test, but they've still got
a lot to prove.
In the factory's 3,500-cubic-metre proving room.
Whoa.
Whoa, whoa, OK.
Right, that is hot and it is steaming.
It's almost tropical.
Like, my glasses are steaming up.
And it's no wonder.
Having already been to the massage parlour, my dough now gets a sauna.
This proving room is kept at 30 degrees Celsius and 80% humidity.
In these tropical conditions, the yeast gorges on the sugars
in the dough and expels carbon dioxide,
making the croissants expand by 150%.
OK, can I get out? Because I'm already getting hot.
I can feel the heat going up my trousers!
It'll take two hours for the dough to fully rise,
so I'll check in with my croissants later on.
As well as croissants, the French love their bread,
and, as Ruth's finding out, it's played an important ROLL
in the country's history.
Place de la Concorde, Paris.
It was here in the autumn of 1793 that Marie Antoinette,
Queen of France, faced the guillotine.
It was the height of the French Revolution.
Marie Antoinette was hated by revolutionaries,
who wanted to overthrow the French monarchy.
It was claimed that when she heard that Parisians were starving due
to the lack of bread, she declared, "Let them eat cake."
Or, in French, let them eat brioche.
The phrase came to epitomise the conflict between
the royal family and the French people.
But is there really a link between bread
and the French Revolution?
Stephane. Ruth.
Nice to meet you.
Food writer Stephane Henaut has researched the role bread has played
in a city where a trip to the boulangerie is still a daily ritual.
Can we really lay responsibility for the French Revolution upon bread?
There are a lot of reasons why the French Revolution happened but,
yes, one can say that bread, and especially the lack of bread,
was the fuel behind the motor of the French Revolution.
So, how important, historically, was bread?
It is very hard, actually, to overstate the importance of bread
in France at the end of the 18th century,
especially for poor people.
Up to 95% of the daily calorie intake could be met
just with bread. 95%?
Yes, people would eat between 1lb and 3lb of bread per day.
Good gracious.
Feeding the masses meant ensuring a plentiful supply of bread.
Any shortage had a huge impact on people's lives.
In 1788, the harvest was terrible that year.
There was not a lot of grain and the price of bread skyrocketed.
Obviously, this created a traumatic situation for most people
who thought they were going to die of starvation.
By the summer of 1789, bread had become increasingly scarce.
Thousands of Parisians went hungry.
On the 5th October, 1789, a crowd of up to 10,000 people
gathered here in front of the town hall to ask for bread.
And it was a crowd that was made up mostly of women.
Women? Yes, women were in charge of buying bread for their family.
You could have women waiting in line for hours in front of a boulangerie
hoping to get bread, just to be told there was not enough
bread for everybody. Or, if there was, it was such an expensive price
that they could not feed their families.
So, what was the mood of the crowd?
They were just desperate. They thought they were dying of hunger.
They would starve to death.
So, people in Paris started blaming the king.
The idea quickly spread that they should ask the king
directly for bread.
The women set out on a 12-mile march from the town hall
to the palace of Versailles, the King's residence
on the outskirts of Paris.
It must have been quite a sight seeing this procession of women.
Well, I've got here a picture which actually shows all those women
going to Versailles.
As you can see, a lot of women in the picture are having weapons -
pikes and clubs.
You can also see that they are actually lugging around
a cannon with them.
OK, so, quite intimidating. Yes.
The mood among the crowd soon turned ugly.
The national guard managed to restore peace.
However, the King now also had to promise the demonstrators
that he would go back to Paris with them.
The next day, the royal family, escorted by the protesters,
left Versailles for the capital.
This was one of the key events of 1789 because,
from now on, the King would be a de facto prisoner of the Parisian mob
and this situation, much later on, would help the Republicans
to actually declare the first French Republic,
put the King on trial, and send him to the guillotine.
SLICING SOUND AND CHEERING
The revolution that brought about the end of the royal family
created the France we know today.
Perhaps history would have turned out completely differently if only
the French monarchy had made sure that everyone had enough bread.
300 miles south of Paris, in Valence, my croissants have been
proving in the sauna for two hours.
And have expanded by 150%.
Finally, they can head to the oven.
Wow.
Yeah, they've really grown. Yeah.
They look great.
And, here, you can see, there's still 12 layers of butter.
Of course. It's still there.
Without being cooked, even though it's got bigger,
those layers are still there? They're still there.
Perfect.
What are you spraying on it?
Well, this is milk protein with water and it helps
for the croissant to be shiny at the end.
Do you know what? The more I learn about the croissant,
the more I like it.
As our croissants trundle slowly through the giant conveyor oven,
the 200-degree heat triggers a chemical process
known as the Maillard reaction,
where the protein glaze reacts with sugars
in the dough, turning my pallid pastries into bronzed beauties.
Haha!
They are toasty!
During a 15-minute bake,
moisture in the dough evaporates,
pushing those 12 layers out, until...
There they are.
Yeah, that's a pretty sight.
Nice and brown and glazed.
Enough butter, lots of folding.
That has taken far longer than I ever imagined.
Nearly 5.5 half hours, in fact, to get from raw ingredients
to finished, baked pastry.
What happens to them now?
So, now they're going to cool down for about one hour.
My piping-hot croissants now head into this sealed room,
where they get to enjoy another 60-minute chill-out session.
But, once they've cooled, there's still one final test
they need to pass.
So, this is one other quality check.
The final volume of our croissant.
The volume? The volume.
Hello.
Yeah, I can't hear a thing.
The volume is terrible.
This is to make sure the croissant has risen enough.
Since the shape of the croissant is very specific,
we are using the displacement method, using rape seeds.
Why do you use rape seeds? Because it's so fine?
Because it's so tiny that it can fill all the gaps.
And it's also food safe.
So, this is our level box.
We know the exact weight of the rape seeds in this box.
Four croissants are placed in the box,
then covered in rape seeds.
Do you know, I've been to many, many factories, and I have never
seen this ever.
The weight of seeds left over will tell us exactly how much
space those pastries are taking up.
So the more seeds spilt, the bigger the croissant.
Brilliant.
What weight are you looking for?
We want it to be between 500 and 600g.
Yeah, you've got it, OK.
So the croissants are good? Yes.
What would you do if the croissants were the wrong size?
We would adjust the recipe by adding more or less yeast.
Lor, thank you.
You explained croissants to me very patiently.
Thank you very much.
Au revoir. Au revoir.
With the final test complete, my pastries can head off
across the factory.
The smell in here would tempt anyone to get stuck in
to a couple of croissants.
But, scientifically, what's the best way to eat them?
Cherry's finding out.
There's so much to love about croissants and a whole range
of different ways to serve them up.
But can how you serve them affect their taste?
To find out, I'm meeting Professor Barry Smith
from the University of London.
He specialises in the science of our senses.
I love a croissant,
but how do I optimise my croissant-eating experience
to get the most out of it?
Very complicated thing, a croissant.
If you think of it, it's a hybrid between
bread and pastry. Yes.
You've got the flakiness in your fingers,
you've got the elasticity, when you tear it, like a bread, inside.
And, of course, how it looks, how it smells, what temperature
it's at. The texture of it.
All of those things will make a difference.
When I'm eating it, all my senses are stimulated,
so if I change one of those things, will it change the taste?
I think we need to do a scientific experiment to figure out
what happens when we change just one variable.
We're running three tests with the help
of some hungry pastry lovers.
In each experiment, we're serving up
exactly the same croissant.
Each time they're served, we're going to change one thing.
First, does temperature affect our appreciation
of these lovely pastries?
We are going to offer you two croissants, hot and cold.
Taste them both and tell us which one you prefer.
Bon appetit.
I definitely preferred the warmer one. Yeah, me too.
More taste with the hot.
Yeah, the flavours come out a little bit more strongly.
I quite like the butteryness of the warm one.
It actually just melts into your mouth.
It kind of adds the lubrication to your mouthful.
More than 80% of our tasters preferred the warm croissant
over the one at room temperature.
So, temperature really does affect the taste?
It really does because temperature will affect how much butter
is going to ooze fat into the final product.
You get that slippery, fatty sensation in the mouth.
The smells of butter will be more powerful, and that's why
a lot of people said it had more flavour.
Onto test number two.
What have you got up your sleeve?
The same croissant cut in half and we're going to ask people
to try it plain and with jam.
Remember, the croissants are identical.
I'm more about the jam. I prefer the one with the jam.
It's a lot sweeter. Delicious raspberry jam.
Almost three quarters of our taste testers think the croissants taste
better with jam.
When you see people adding a little bit of jam they think,
"The savoury's not enough.
"I'm getting butteriness, I'm getting maybe the slight
"saltiness of the pastry or the dough," but, add the sugar,
then they think, "Wonderful".
So, that's the holy trinity - sweetness, fat and salt?
That's the combination that we don't get in nature.
We have concocted that and, when we get it, it drives us crazy.
We want a lot of it.
So far, we've tested the temperature and the sweetness.
But can the way we serve up our croissants make a difference?
More croissants for you?
In the final test, we're serving each taster
identical croissants on a plate and in a paper bag.
In terms of flavour, I think I prefer the bag.
Yeah, strange, I agree.
The paper bag somehow makes the experience better and, oddly,
unexpectedly, makes the croissant taste better.
Over 70% of our taste testers preferred the croissant
in the paper bag.
How does the paper bag enhance the taste?
The paper bag is crinkly,
it makes a sound of crinkling and it feels crinkly.
It's reminiscent of the flaky pastry of the croissant.
So ,I feel crinkly paper, I think flaky pastry?
So, you've got the sensory feeling in the fingers and then what you get
in the mouth being exactly the same, and that's a continuous sense
of touch, and the brain really likes that.
So, expectation and perception play a really big part in taste?
Your expectations are set by many things.
How something looks, how it smells,
how it feels in the fingers before you eat it.
And all of those things are potentially enhancing
the experience when you put the food in your mouth.
So, when it comes to getting the most out of your croissant,
it really isn't just about the croissant itself.
It's about the temperature, it's about what you put on it.
It's even about how you serve it -
in a humble paper bag.
Back in France, my 6,000 freshly baked croissants
have now finished cooling.
So, I'm heading to the packing area.
The man in charge is Olivier Ripoche.
Wonderful.
These have now cooled down?
Yes, now they are ready to be packing, OK?
It's taken well over six hours to get to this point.
Let's hope it's all been worth it.
So now I can break this?
Yes.
All those layers, all those little air pockets.
That's what makes this croissant so light.
You didn't see me eating that, did you? No, no.
Good, come on.
These croissants are all destined for the family-sized six-pack.
But they're wrapped in pairs first so two could be opened and eaten
without the others going stale.
They look like they're going to fall off.
No, no. They will be stuck to the beds.
There is no problem at all.
To stop it raining pastry in here, sticky rubber strips
on the conveyors keep the croissants firmly in place on their way
to a machine called the picker.
I love these. I've seen these pickers at other factories.
This may be the most delicate picker I've ever seen,
because that is a delicate product.
Yes. We control how we take it very gently.
Very gently.
Each of these laser-guided dancing arms uses four suction cups to lift
the packs without damaging the delicate contents.
Combined, they pick up 9,000 packs every hour,
stacking them in threes,
and turning our happy pairs into families of six,
ready for the final stage of packing.
There's our six-pack, right?
Yes, yes. This pack is for the UK market.
Is that how we will see it in the shops?
Yes. Exactly like this. Fabulous. Am I able to lift that?
Yes, but be careful, it is very hot inside.
So, don't touch anything, please.
How hot is it?
More than 40 degrees.
Right. Very hot. Yes.
As the croissants travel down the line, a cellophane sheet
is wrapped around them and the seam bonded shut using heat.
Another heated blade then slices and separates each pack,
while simultaneously melting the cut edges so they stick together.
In just one hour, 3,000 six-packs are filled
with 18,000 individual croissants.
At the next station, the top of each bag is mechanically
pinched, and then a U-shaped section of plastic twist tie is curled
around the neck.
I can't remember seeing one of those in a factory.
We used to have those ties on the bread, back in the UK.
56 boxes of eight, sealed bags are stacked on pallets and handed
over to the most advanced workers on the payroll.
You've got robots?
Yes. I love the robots.
The factory's army of automated helpers are fitted with special
sensors to stop them mowing down the more,
well, organic members of staff.
Do you ever put yourself in front of them to see if they stop?
They will stop, but I don't want to try it.
If you'd told me as a child these would exist,
I wouldn't have believed it. It's incredible, yes.
MUSIC: Tour de France by Kraftwerk
These robots follow pre-programmed routes
using GPS beacons installed around the factory.
Collecting pallets loaded with 2,688 croissants from the packing area,
and taking them all the way to the distribution centre.
So, here we are, right? Yes, we are in the dispatch area.
I like your dispatch area. Thank you.
It's very clean, it's very modern. Thank you very much.
How many trucks leave here every day?
60. Really?
60 trucks a day, yes.
Wow.
How many croissants on a truck?
88,704.
We should go in there, me and you, eat four,
to give it a nice round number. 8,700...
Yes, but some customer will complain that they missed
a four-pack of croissants.
What country is your biggest customer?
Who loves the croissants the most?
The French, France.
I don't know why I even asked that question. I feel stupid. No.
The French may be the biggest consumers, but over 2 million
of these flaky pastry treats leave here each week
destined for every corner of the globe...
..including the UK, Europe,
the USA and even South Korea.
I've enjoyed my trip to France
watching the making of such an iconic pastry.
There's a lot more science behind it than I imagined.
I mean, there's flour and butter and sugar,
most certainly, but there's also a lot of pulling
and pushing and folding.
But I now know what it's all about - it's about the layers.