What type of pastry is a croissant?

A croissant is a viennoiserie, a baked product made with techniques and ingredients that sit between ordinary bread and pastry. The category includes enriched or laminated doughs, often containing butter, eggs, milk, or sugar.

Croissants belong to the laminated branch of viennoiserie. Their dough is rolled and folded around butter several times, creating many thin layers. During baking, water in the butter and dough turns to steam, helping separate those layers and producing the pastry’s crisp exterior and flaky interior.

This classification explains why the alternatives are tempting but inaccurate. Brioche is also a viennoiserie, but its dough is rich and soft rather than laminated in the croissant style. Choux pastry relies on a cooked dough and steam for expansion. Puff pastry is laminated, but it normally lacks the yeast that gives croissant dough its characteristic fermentation and bread-like structure.

The word viennoiserie means “things in the style of Vienna.” The term reflects the influence of Austrian baking in nineteenth-century Paris, even though the modern croissant became strongly associated with French bakery culture.