Saturday Bake-Along Working Thread — Croissant Bread Good morning, bakers. It's bake day. This is our working thread. Park it, pin it, keep it open. Everything happens right here today. Questions, progress shots, butter emergencies, wins, and the honest ones too. I'll be in this thread all day from the first fold to the last slice. Drop a comment when you start so we know who's in the kitchen. Two paths today. Yeasted for the same-day crowd, sourdough for the planners who shaped and cold proofed overnight. Both recipes are in the Recipe Pantry. One last look if you need it. Now here's everything you need in one place. THE ONE RULE Keep it cold. Cold butter, cold dough, cold tools, quick hands. Frozen butter makes steam in the oven, and steam makes the layers. Warm butter blends in and the layers vanish. When in doubt, chill. BEFORE YOU START Butter frozen rock hard. Grater, rolling pin, and pan cold if you froze them last night. Have a dry dish towel ready to hold the butter while you grate so your body heat doesn't melt it. THE TIPS THAT MAKE OR BREAK IT This is a stiff dough. Don't be alarmed, that's normal for this loaf. Hold the butter with a dry towel as you grate. Bare hands melt it. Don't manhandle it. No pressing and patting like usual. Quick and gentle. Freezer between folds, not just the fridge. Lock that butter up tight. Roll it up tight and even. A loose roll is where the gaps come from. A little water on the seam helps it close and hold. If the butter ever looks shiny or starts to smear, STOP and chill before you go on. THE BAKE 375F (190C). Bake to temperature, not color. This loaf browns fast because of the egg wash and milk sugars, so it'll look done before it is. Pull it at 190F (88C) in the center. If the top runs ahead and gets too dark, tent it loosely with foil for the last 10 minutes. THE HARDEST PART Let it cool before you slice. Yeasted, 30 minutes minimum. Sourdough, 45. I know it smells incredible. Cutting too soon turns that beautiful crumb gummy. Wait anyway.

Maybe it was because it was on croissant bread, I don’t know I can’t think clearly. I mixed up eggs, milk, salt, and pepper, cinnamon and an eighth of a teaspoon of banana extract. Poured the leftover eggs between all the swirls while in the pan and this thing just melts in your mouth and has that faint hint of banana, oh my goodness. Partially too because the bread is so delicate.

Quick heads up. Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and most of Meta is down worldwide right now. People are getting logged out, hitting error screens, and watching feeds refuse to load. Nobody’s been told what caused it yet, and there’s no word on when it comes back. If you’ve been trying to reach the Baking Great Bread at Home group and couldn’t get in, that’s why. It’s not you. It’s not your account. It’s their servers. Here’s the thing worth sitting with for a minute. When you build your whole baking life inside somebody else’s platform, you’re at the mercy of their bad day. This is exactly why Crust & Crumb Academy lives here, on its own ground. No feed to fight. No algorithm deciding who sees what. No outage locking you out of the people and recipes you came for. So while the rest of the internet runs to X to ask if Facebook is broken, you’ve got a kitchen to be in. What are you baking today? Drop it below. Let’s keep the ovens warm while Meta sorts itself out. ~Henry⭐️🔥

You've seen it all over your feed. The loaf that bakes up with the flaky, buttery, pull-apart layers of a croissant. Except there's no butter block, no three-day pastry school, and no two failed batches before you get it right. Here's the trick: you grate frozen butter right into the dough and fold it in. That's the whole secret. The cold butter makes steam in the oven, and the steam makes the layers. Anybody in this kitchen can do this one. And we're doing it two ways, like always: 🧈 Yeasted, for the same-day crowd. Start in the morning, eat it that night. https://pantry.bakinggreatbread.com/recipes/croissant-bread-yeasted 🌙 Sourdough, for the planners. A longer build and an overnight cold proof for real tang. https://pantry.bakinggreatbread.com/recipes/sourdough-croissant-bread Both recipes land in the Recipe Pantry this week, and we bake together Saturday morning in the working thread. I'll be right there with you, start to finish. One thing you can do today: put a stick of butter in the freezer. Cold butter is the whole game, and we'll get into why this week. So tell me: are you Team Yeasted or Team Sourdough this Saturday? Drop it below. 👇 Perfection is not required. Progress is. Henry ⭐🔥

I never ask you to bake anything I haven’t baked first. So today I ran the croissant bread, yeasted version, start to finish. Here’s exactly how the butter stage went down. Rolled the dough out to size. Then the butter: I kept the stick in the freezer along with the box grater itself. Cold tool, cold butter. I gripped the butter with a dry kitchen towel while grating so my hand heat wouldn’t transfer through, and grated it onto a saucer instead of straight onto the dough. Then I used a wooden spoon to tip the butter off the saucer onto the dough. No fingers. Every choice in that paragraph is about one thing: keeping that butter cold. Covered two thirds of the surface, then folded like a letter. Unbuttered third over the middle, buttered third over that. Three layers. Wrapped it quick and into the fridge for 20 minutes. Here’s a trick you won’t see in most videos. When I pulled it out and squared it up, I ran a sharp blade down the folded edges before rolling. Those folds hold tension like a closed book spine. Release them and the dough rolls out evenly instead of fighting you. Rolled, folded again, scored the new edges, wrapped it, back in the fridge for another 20. Saturday you’ll be doing this exact dance with me. If anything in these photos raises a question, drop it below. That’s what tonight’s thread is for. Henry ⭐🔥