What does it take to build a croissant empire? Determination, the willingness to risk it all, and in Lune founder Kate Reid’s case, a degree in aerospace engineering. In this extract from her new memoir, Destination Moon, Reid takes us back to her very first foray in the test kitchen – from botched batches to “objectively perfect” pastries – the moment that launched Lune.
Here’s Reid now with how, where and when it all started:
In an address to Congress on the 25th of May 1961, President John F Kennedy formally declared a national goal: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.
– President John F Kennedy, 12 September 1962
He may have been referring to a far loftier pursuit, but the sentiment resonated with me. Just as with the NASA program, I was about to venture bravely (and somewhat ignorantly) into the unknown.
My version of the Apollo program began on the 1st of June 2012.
Destination: Lune.
In order to meet my production requirements, the kitchen at 29 Scott Street required some renovation. The little shop was also blessed with a mezzanine, which I planned to convert into my living quarters. It was big enough for a double bed and a couch, which was all I needed. It was impractical for me to remain living in Abbotsford, paying rent on both a shop and an apartment (especially as my income was about to reduce significantly – to nothing). And the convenience of living above the bakery was indisputable.
I kept my job at Three Bags Full while the works were happening on the little site in Scott Street. It was important that I had some money coming in, as I learned quickly that bakery equipment isn’t cheap. My time in Paris had taught me that to make exceptional croissants, I would need both the highest-quality ingredients and the best equipment I could afford.
Creating the layers of dough and butter was a critical part of the process, so I forked out for a brand-new benchtop laminator (my old mate, the Jurassic-age glorified pasta machine simply wasn’t going to cut it), and I’d been investigating retarder-prover cabinets for months already. The exact one I wanted wasn’t available from any distributors in Australia, so I made the insane decision to purchase it direct from the manufacturer in France, which required me to navigate a stupid amount of government red tape related to importing commercial electrical equipment. It also wasn’t due to arrive in the country until October and would then need time to clear customs. I needed a prover to start my testing and development, so I sourced a small second-hand unit from a donut business.
Choosing the right oven felt like such a scary decision. At Du Pain et des Idées in Paris they had done all the baking in large deck ovens, but those types of ovens are more suited to bread (which I had already firmly decided I would not be making). I obsessively researched the best ovens for viennoiseries (the family of pastries the croissant belongs to), eventually deciding on an Australian-produced convection oven. I also needed a commercial under-bench fridge and, finally, a spiral mixer for the dough.
All my free time was spent working on the business. I had to complete a Food Safety Supervisors’ Certificate and reapply for a food licence for the premises. This was easier said than done. The landlord, who lived overseas, wasn’t overly supportive about the shop being used for food production again. Many emails were sent back and forth until we eventually agreed that when the lease ended, I would have to return the shop to its original fit-out, which had been an office. Not ideal, but I’d worry about that later. I also needed to establish processes like logging fridge temperatures and simple bookkeeping, deliveries and invoicing, and find suppliers for all the ingredients required to make the best croissants.
And, finally, I had to register the business. But in order to do that I needed to decide on a name.
Since coming back from Paris and starting to work in earnest on the idea of my own little café, I’d come up with a few names. But one kept coming back to me, a suggestion from many years ago, in a different era of my life. I remembered sitting on the couch in Dashwood Road with Martin, admiring my newly framed Tintin poster. ‘If you ever open a café, you should call it Objectif Lune . . .’ Lune. I liked the shape my mouth made when I said it with a French accent: Lune. Considering it further, ‘croissant lune’ translated to ‘crescent moon’ and, after all, I had always loved the moon, even as a child. And, while I’d chosen to study aerospace engineering because of Formula 1, throughout my studies I’d developed a deep fascination and love for space exploration, in particular, the race to the moon. Lune. It couldn’t possibly be called anything else.
I hung my framed Objectif Lune print in the bakery, a reminder of what it felt like to dream big, of aiming for the moon. It seemed obvious that Lune’s logo had to be a rocket, but I wasn’t a designer or illustrator. There was only one person for the job: Van, my brilliant, artistic friend from first-year university. Destined for this assignment, she drew me the perfect rocket – it had a mid-century feel, a nod to my love for both Tintin and the early space-race. I had a vinyl transfer made and Dad helped me apply it to the front window of the little shop.
I now had a bakery, complete with all the necessary equipment. I had my certificate granting me permission to produce pastries onsite. I’d found a flour supplier and a dozen different butters I wanted to test. I had a name. I had a logo.
Now all I needed were the croissants.
It reached the point where I had to cut the umbilical cord of my job at Three Bags Full. I had everything I needed to start recipe-testing at Lune; it was time to jump in the deep end and devote myself to learning to swim. Otherwise, Lune was nothing but an indulgent and expensive hobby.
I handed in my resignation and worked out the notice period. Finally, gainfully unemployed, I decided that one particular day was going to be the particular day. I lined up the ingredients on my beautiful new marble bench that Dad had made for me. Methodically, I worked through a dough recipe I’d formulated in the months prior. It wasn’t a wheel-reinventing recipe; I’d taken my learnings from Du Pain, plus I’d researched the effects of including different ingredients in sweetened enriched dough, most notably from Michel Suas’ epic tome Advanced Bread and Pastry, which had become my new bible. I acknowledged this first test was simply a starting point, a baseline from which to innovate.
After mixing the dough to achieve the desired temperature, I removed it from my brand-new little spiral mixer, portioned it into several smaller batches and fashioned each into a perfect boule (just as I’d learned at Du Pain), placed each boule in its own container, then carefully created a second skin with cling film. I left the dough to rest at room temperature for an hour before transferring it to the fridge where it would have a bit of chilly R&R until tomorrow.
I then selected one of the French butters I’d procured for testing and spent an exorbitant length of time fashioning it into perfect rectangles.
Day One: done.
The next morning I pulled a dough out of the fridge, pried it out of its container, then, staring at it in panic, came to the terrifying realisation that I didn’t know what to do next. This had always been Sebastien’s job at Du Pain. He’d been fiercely protective of any task that required the laminoir. The only experience I had with incorporating the butter into the dough to create the layers was the couple of times I’d attempted croissants at Mum and Dad’s house using the prehistoric ‘pasta machine’ and, frankly, the results of those attempts had been laughable.
Like a supercomputer, I quickly processed my options:
- Admit this was a bold undertaking. Give up. Ask for my job back at Three Bags Full.
- Admit this was a bold undertaking. Press pause on the business for now. Try desperately to get an apprenticeship somewhere or sign up for a Certificate in Patisserie to learn the rest of the process. Kind of important. (Might have to move back in with Mum and Dad.)
- Admit this was a bold undertaking. Forge ahead using the skills and resources I did have. Think like an engineer. Work backwards and figure this out for myself.
This was a bold undertaking. Maybe I was ignorant to think I was ready for it. But I had something most bakers don’t have: a degree in aerospace engineering. I knew how to solve complex problems. I was adept at testing and development. I could capture data, analyse it and draw conclusions. I could innovate. Option three was the only option. This was going to organise and measure the best of my energies and skills, it was a challenge I was willing to accept and unwilling to postpone – and one I intended to win.
It took eleven missions before finally Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the surface of the moon, planted an American flag and uttered the enduring words: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’
Apollo 1 was an unmitigated disaster, with tragically fatal results. During a launch test at Cape Kennedy, a fire inside the cabin of the command module killed the three astronauts trapped inside.
The first few times I tried to use the laminator did not yield positive results. I imagined that operating it was not dissimilar to navigating the lunar module Eagle to land on the surface of the moon. There were so many things to think about all at once, and it required nimble hand-eye coordination. My particular benchtop laminator was an entry-level model, so I had to drive it manually, progressively decreasing the distance between the two large metal rollers with a lever that had some perfunctory guide markings. I ruined a few batches of pastry getting the hang of that thing. Finally, I got to the point where I could consistently achieve a 3mm-thick sheet of laminated pastry.
Once I had a passable sheet of pastry on the bench in front of me, the next step was to cut the croissants from the batch. This might not seem a difficult task, but it proved to be yet another variable that caused me untold grief. In France we had used a cutting tool, which looked like two pizza wheels held together with alternating zig-zagging blades. The tool would be rolled across the pastry, deftly cutting 40-odd croissants in a matter of seconds. I had purchased such a tool on the internet, and when I first took it for a test-drive over a sheet of pastry, I discovered it was not quite as easy as Sebastien had made it look. It also cut triangles that intuitively felt far too big; the weight of the piece of pastry in my hand seemed at least double that of the raw croissants at Du Pain.
Casting my mind back to wind-tunnel testing at Williams, where we would simply discard parts that didn’t perform as we’d hoped, I chose to approach this apparent setback as an opportunity to learn, even though I knew the croissants were too big. I consulted Christophe via email, and he generously gave me advice on the temperature, humidity and time required to prove the croissants.
Following the advice, I placed a tray of croissants in my ancient stop-gap prover, set a timer and went on with other work. When I came back to see if they were ready to bake, I was mortified at the scene that greeted me. They looked pretty similar to those first disastrous croissants I’d made at Mum and Dad’s. Each little flabby guy was languishing in a pool of his own melted butter. After all that investment in the laminator, a proper mixer, and even a cutting tool, I still wasn’t getting results.
Disheartened, I put them in the oven. Surprisingly, they baked up better than I’d expected. In fact, they didn’t look that different to the croissants at Du Pain, apart from being significantly oversized. Okay, well, I had a lot of things to work on, but this was promising.
Over the course of the following weeks I changed variables, one at a time, recorded and analysed the results, drawing conclusions as to the effect of each variable.
And then one day, I pulled a tray of croissants out of the prover and nearly cried. They looked objectively perfect, like they had been generated by a 3D printer. Each layer of pastry and butter was accounted for, and there was not a single drop of melted butter escaping from between the paper-thin layers of dough. I didn’t know what a croissant should look like when it had been correctly proven, but my guess was that it was something exactly like this.
With the steady hand of a Dutch master, I reverently painted the proven croissants with egg-wash, ensuring that my brushstrokes followed the same direction as the layers, and never across them. I didn’t want to do anything to destroy their perfect form.
I preheated the oven and slid in the tray. Instead of setting a timer, I stood sentry at the oven and watched their progress, only removing them when I felt the shade of golden was just right. Thirteen minutes.
I stared at them for what felt like an eternity. These beautiful creations, resplendent on the tray in front of me – I had made these. I selected one and took a bite from the ear. It wasn’t greasy or doughy or stodgy. Instead, it was so buttery, so light, so delicate, so textural. It was the best croissant I’d ever eaten. That’s one small step for woman . . .
Excitedly, I called Mum and Dad. ‘I’m coming over with croissants! Put the coffee machine on!’
This is an extract from Destination Moon by Kate Reid. Destination Moon (Simon & Schuster, RRP $49.99) is out now, including from such excellent independent bookstores such as Readings.