The fat in a perfect croissant

Braulio Macias Rodriguez, and Alejandro G. Marangoni

Citation: Physics Today 71, 1, 70 (2018);

View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3828
View Table of Contents: http://physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/71/1
Published by the American Institute of Physics
QUICK STUDY Braulio Macias Rodriquez is a postdoctoral
fellow and Alejandro Marangoni (www
.crcfoodandhealth.com) is a professor and
Canada Research Chair in the department of
food science at the University of Guelph in
Ontario, Canada.

The fat in a perfect croissant

Braulio Macias Rodriguez and Alejandro G. Marangoni

Delicious, flaky croissants owe their wonderful texture to the complex, multiscale structure of
butter or related fats.

C
roissants are literally the stuff of legend. One often-told
story is that the pastry was created by Viennese bakers
after the city defeated the Turkish army at the Battle of
Vienna in 1683. The crescent was a prominent part of
the flag of the Ottoman Empire, so by enjoying a crois-
sant you could symbolically bite the vanquished
enemy. Other stories trace the croissant back to the Battle of
Tours in 732, when Frankish and Burgundian forces defeated
an army of the Umayyad Caliphate.
You don’t need much to bake croissants, just some dough,
chiefly made from wheat flour and water, and some fat, typically
butter. In large-scale manufacturing, sheets of the dough and fat
about 1 cm thick are layered on top of each other or the fat is ex-
truded between dough sheets. Repeated rolling and folding, a
process called lamination, creates alternating layers of dough and
fat each about 100–200 μm thick. The mutually alternating layers,
typically 18–32 in a croissant, give the bread its billowy appear-
ance and flaky texture: During baking, the vaporization of water
in the dough inflates the layers, which expand like balloons.
Not too hard, not too soft
The rheological properties of the fat—that is, the way it deforms
and flows—have a significant bearing on the quality of the
croissant. A fat has to have just the right degree of hardness for
lamination to succeed. A fat that is too hard can break during
lamination and can also rupture the dough. A fat that is too
soft will absorb into the dough. So the wrong fat can translate
into dense, crumbly, soulless croissants and unhappy customers.
Luckily, bakers and scientists, long concerned with textural
and mouthfeel food attributes (see the Quick Study by Erich
Windhab, PHYSICS TODAY, June 2006, page 82), have recognized
that not every fat is appropriate for every task. Thus they have
contributed, from empirical experience, to the development of
fats for specialized functions.
An example of a type of fat appropriate for a specific pur-
pose is the so-called roll-in or puff-pastry fat used in croissants.
The best croissants are made with butter; indeed, consumers
are desirous enough of butter that some regions of Europe are
currently experiencing a butter shortage. Sometimes, though,
constraints of cost or processing temperature dictate that other
roll-in fats be used. In our lab work, for example, we studied
croissants made with shortening. The different roll-in fats have
somewhat different properties. For instance, to achieve good
lamination with butter, the temperature needs to be held in the
relatively narrow range of 15–20 °C, as bakers well know.
70 PHYSICS TODAY | JANUARY 2018
Shortening will laminate well over a wider temperature range.
The rheological response of roll-in fats arises from an un-
derlying colloidal network of fat crystals. As discussed below,
the network, sculpted by the fat’s formulation and crystalliza-
tion, has structure on multiple scales. To ensure good lamina-
tion characteristics, the crystallization must be carefully carried
out. The roll-in fats are cooled and mechanically worked so as
to produce many small crystals and to impart a degree of mi-
croscopic ordering to the crystal network.
The professional baker evaluates a roll-in fat by pressing
and manipulating it between the fingers and relying on expert
feel. For the scientist, a more appropriate approach might be
to subject fats to a well-defined deformation—for example, a
periodic oscillation—and to express their behaviors in a stress
(internal force per unit area) versus strain (relative extension)
plot, such as panel a of the figure.
The technique we used to obtain the plot is called large am-
plitude oscillatory shear, or LAOS, rheology. The approach is
sufficiently new that it is itself a topic of research, but in any
case, it can be used to probe the structure and function of var-
ious materials, including polymers, colloids, and foods. LAOS
decomposes a material’s oscillatory response into elastic and
viscous contributions.
As panel a shows, for very small strain, the stress of both
roll-in and all-purpose fat responds linearly. The fats act like
viscoelastic solids and deform reversibly; in fact, that solid-like
response is observed across the frequency spectrum. The linear
regime is very narrow and terminates at a critical strain on the
order of 0.01%, a value typical of materials acting via short-range
or van der Waals interactions. Strains beyond the critical value
are sufficient to disrupt the network and initiate irreversible
yielding behavior. During the lamination process, a roll-in fat
must withstand pressures that are easily sufficient to drive the
material to the nonlinear regime.
Our LAOS experiments reveal that the two types of fat gave
comparable maximum stress, or yield stress, in the range of
4000–5000 Pa. But their yielding behaviors are quite different:
Roll-in fat displays a broad stress plateau when deformed,
whereas the all-purpose fat shows an abrupt stress drop in-
dicative of internal breakage; thus an all-purpose fat cannot
laminate well.
Structure
The rheology of fat arises from the hierarchical self-organization
of its structure, which combines physical length scales ranging
CROISSANT-OLOGY. Croissants are appealingly flaky because of the types of fats, called roll-in fats, that are used to make them. (a) Roll-in
fats respond differently to being deformed than do all-purpose fats. The plots show how internal forces (stress is force per unit area) develop
as a fat is periodically deformed (strain is the amplitude of the relative size increase) at an angular frequency of 3.6 radians per second.
The sharp buildup and sudden fall of stress in the all-purpose fat signals a failure of internal structure. (Adapted from B. Macias Rodriguez,
A. G. Marangoni, Crit. Rev. Food Sci. Nutr., in press, doi:10.1080/10408398.2017.1325835.) (b) In fats, triglyceride molecules crystallize into
nanoscale platelets, such as those shown in this electron micrograph. The platelets represent the smallest scale of three structural levels in
a roll-in fat. (c) This electron micrograph shows part of the largest-scale structural feature in fats, a microscale crystal network in which liquid
oil can be embedded. (Background croissant photograph courtesy of noblige/iStock/Thinkstock.)

from a few angstroms to several tens of micrometers. At the
molecular level, fats are made of triglyceride (TG) molecules in
which a trio of fatty acids emanate from a glycerol backbone.
As much as we love croissants, we would be remiss if we did
not note that the roll-in fats so essential for their texture may
have a high content of trans-fatty acid, whose excessive con-
sumption is detrimental to cardiovascular health. Indeed, one
of the motivations for our research is to devise alternatives to
roll-in fats that are healthier but yield equally delicious and
flaky croissants.
X-ray scattering experiments distinguish three structural
levels in roll-in fats, as reflected in the distinct power-law
regimes evident in a plot of the ultra-small-angle scattering
intensity versus scattering angle. The first, smallest-scale level
encompasses nanosized platelets, TG crystals (see panel b in
the figure). Those platelets are smaller in roll-in fats than in all-
purpose fats and have smoother boundaries. The second level,
which is absent in all-purpose fats, comprises crystal aggregates,
cylindrical in form and with modest height-to-diameter ratios,
that spontaneously stick together to form clusters with sub-
micron and micron sizes. It is those clusters that make up the
third structural level, a microscopic crystal network in which
liquid oil is embedded.
The complementary technique of electron microscopy re-
veals that in roll-in fats, the crystal clusters are organized into
an ordered, layered network, as shown in panel c of the figure.
The regular fats are, by comparison, relatively disordered.
The different length scales in a fat’s structural hierarchy
have important implications in energy dissipation, as observed
in their rheology. In biological and natural materials, the incor-
poration of multiple length scales can confer toughening and
defect tolerance. The reason is that the scale hierarchy, in con-
junction with a suitable microscopic mechanism, enables the
local dissipation of high stresses that would otherwise induce
material failure. Indeed, roll-in fats, with their tripartite struc-
ture, dissipate about 10 times more stress energy than do all-
purpose fats. Stress dissipation in fats and the response of their
microstructure under nonlinear deformations are topics that
still warrant investigation. One intriguing issue is the possi-
bility of an additional feature of roll-in fats: a sliding of the
crystalline layers that may also affect energy dissipation and
croissant flakiness.
Additional resources
‣ N. C. Acevedo, A. G. Marangoni, “Characterization of the
nanoscale in triacylglycerol crystal networks,” Cryst. Growth
Des. 10, 3327 (2010).
‣ K. Hyun et al., “A review of nonlinear oscillatory shear tests:
Analysis and application of large amplitude oscillatory shear
(LAOS),” Prog. Polym. Sci. 36, 1697 (2011).
‣ A. G. Marangoni et al., “Structure and functionality of edi-
ble fats,” Soft Matter 8, 1275 (2012).
‣ F. Peyronel, D. A. Pink, A. G. Marangoni, “Triglyceride
nanocrystal aggregation into polycrystalline colloidal networks:
Ultra-small angle x-ray scattering, models and computer sim-
ulation,” Curr. Opin. Colloid Interface Sci. 19, 459 (2014).
‣ T. A. Vilgis, “Soft matter food physics—the physics of food
and cooking,” Rep. Prog. Phys. 78, 124602 (2015).
‣ B. Macias Rodriguez, A. G. Marangoni, “Rheological char-
acterization of triglyceride shortenings,” Rheol. Acta 55, 767
(2016). PT

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