Croissants Lab114 recipes
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Croissants around the world

108 croissant recipes in 5 languages: English 54, French 22, Italian 12, German 11 and Portuguese 9. Each is reduced to grams per 100 g of flour, the same as everywhere in the lab, so a French page and an American one line up. English, the largest group, is the one the others are compared with.

The language is the page's, not the cook's country: a French page may be from Quebec, a Portuguese one from Brazil, a Dutch one from Belgium. Each language's lines are read in its own words and units, and a recipe that gives “a pinch” of salt counts a pinch.

Also in the lab, too few to compare (under 8 recipes): Dutch 3 and Spanish 3.

Where they part from English

The clearest differences for each language, medians per 100 g of flour. Only differences large enough to matter and unlikely to be chance are listed (how below).

  • Italian 12 recipesItalian recipes use 71% more sugar than English ones (17% against 10% of the flour weight).
  • French 22 recipesFrench recipes use 20% less butter than English ones (52% against 65% of the flour weight).
  • German 11 recipesGerman recipes use 14% less milk or water than English ones (52% against 60% of the flour weight) and 25% less sugar (7.5% against 10%).

Portuguese (9) shows no clear difference from English on any ingredient.

Every ingredient, language by language

Grams per 100 g of flour. One row a language, largest first.

middle half, and the median (the number at right; when most use none, the share that uses any)middle half of every recipesmall number after a name: recipes

Butter
Milk or water
Sugar
Salt
Yeast
Egg in the dough

The typical batch in each language

The median of each language's recipes for every ingredient, scaled to 500 g of flour. No single recipe is exactly this. Under each, the recipe nearest its language's medians.

The medians and middle halves as a table
Median and middle half per 100 g of flour, by language
LanguageButterMilk or waterSugarSaltYeastEgg in the dough
English 5465%57% to 76%60%57% to 67%10%8.9% to 12%2%1.5% to 2.4%1.7%1.2% to 2.4%0%0% to 9.9%
French 2252%39% to 60%58%50% to 62%10%8.2% to 12%2%1.7% to 2%1.4%1.1% to 2%3.5%0% to 10%
Italian 1260%52% to 70%52%49% to 64%17%14% to 22%1.8%1.2% to 2.4%0.9%0.8% to 1.6%7.9%3.5% to 20%
German 1150%46% to 59%52%48% to 56%7.5%5.3% to 7.9%2%1.6% to 2.3%1.4%1.3% to 2.2%10%0% to 19%
Portuguese 950%50% to 64%56%49% to 58%10%4.1% to 11%2%1.5% to 2%2.3%2.2% to 2.5%10%0% to 10%

How the comparison works

A language gets a row with at least 8 recipes. Each is compared with the English recipes on every ingredient, and a difference is listed only when it clears two bars: the medians sit at least a third of the middle half of all recipes apart (about half a standard deviation, a medium effect), and a rank test puts the gap at 3 standard errors or more, so a language with few recipes needs a large difference. For an ingredient many recipes skip, the share using none counts too: at least 25 points apart, at the same 3 standard errors.

Every ingredient is tested for every language, a few dozen tests per lab, which is why the bar is higher than the usual two standard errors. Salt is listed last when it differs: many recipes give it as a pinch or leave it to taste. Shares and “more than” percentages are rounded down, so none is an overstatement.

These are what recipe writers in each language do, not rules of each country's cooking. A language with 8 to 20 recipes may come mostly from a few sites; each recipe page names its source.