What is in the Ottolenghi croissant and what makes it so good? The ingredients are hardly a secret: French flour, French butter, milk, water, caster sugar, fresh yeast, salt and egg. Yet this is hardly the entire story. The real picture involves a slow fermentation process overnight, a carefully executed layering of the butter inside the dough, a perfect last-minute rise in our humid proofing cabinets, a highly controlled bake and… Irek Krok the magician with the great hand that rolls out the most precise faultlessly shaped croissants.

Still, even with Irek, croissants pose a constant challenge. This is due to the unpredictable, almost unruly, nature of this beast. Croissants are so capricious that the slightest change in the weather, the tiniest of variation in the flour quality, a small difference in the hand that rolls them – and you can face a disastrous outcome.

So we are, like scientists in a lab, constantly trying to isolate the cause, to pin-point the factor, to get the croissants back on track every time they deviate, and give them the wonderfully fragile crispy-thin outside with a smooth honeycomb formed interior and a sweet buttery flavour that lingers.