viennoiserie

As the name suggests, France’s bakers learned the recipe for the viennoiserie of their croissants from the Austrians, in particular a Viennese artillery officer named August Zang, who came to Paris and opened the Boulangerie Viennoise, where he introduced the küpfel, bread rolls that used beer yeast rather than a sourdough starter and were baked in a steam oven. Zang called them pains de fantaisie.

He then returned to Vienna to found Die Presse, a newspaper based on the former French newspaper La Presse, and which is still published today.

The French made the küpfel their own, improving the recipe by laminating—a technique invented in the Middle East in the 13th century— folding the thin layers of dough around sheets of butter, creating 27 layers of butter encased in 28 layers of pastry—which is why they are so decadently delicious.