The taste of bread : Croissant

Waking up early in the morning on a winter morning can be fun. I was expecting frost all around and condensation in the car windows. Alas, I found the morning to be quite opposite. Even the wind was not blowing as it does often. My wife have been wanting to have driving lessons and sensing the optimal conditions, I decided to take her on a couple of lessons. Being tired after the lessons, she went back to sleep and this meant no breakfast. :(

Waking up just in time for a brunch, she wants to have a quick shopping and out we go to the shopping centre to get some groceries. This is how I came to have breakfast with a wonderful french bread - The Croissant. There was nothing wrong with the ingredients, and I just loved the splendid taste.

Since I loved the bread (which is somewhat rare), I wanted to find out how it is made and did a bit of reading on the net. They are made of a leavened variant of puff pastry by layering yeast dough with butter and rolling and folding a few times in succession, then rolling. Making croissants by hand requires skill and patience; a batch of croissants can take several days to complete. However, the development of factory-made, frozen, pre-formed but unbaked dough has made them into a fast food which can be freshly baked by unskilled labour. Indeed, the croissanterie was explicitly a French response to American-style fast food. The pastries are extremely popular in France as well as in other nations, and are typically eaten with breakfast. In some cases, croissants may also be filled with sweet or savoury ingredient, or used like bread to make croissant sandwiches.

The French pastry? Not really so. It was around 1683 that the Ottoman Empire decided to take over Venice. The Ottoman Turks and Venetians - Comparing the two, it was clear that the Turks was greater in number. However that does not undermine the power of Venetians.

Finally, the battle arose and Venice manages to hold their stand. They won the battle. To celebrate, all the bakers in the country decided to bake a new cake shaped as Crescent , just like the symbol of Ottoman Turks Empire. They believed that by eating the cakes, it is the symbolic represent that they are eating out the Turks from their land. Thus that was how the Croissant invented at first. Surprising?

I can't believe I never knew about these delicious breads. I'm hungry for a croissant, now. I love to taste the butter to the fullest! Go ahead, enjoy a Croissant.

I live in a different time zone now. So the post timing dose not mean that I am up late in the night :)