The Lune-iverse has been growing at an astronomical pace. But the Melbourne-born croissanterie is making a play for worldwide domination with its new cookbook, Lune: Croissants All Day, All Night, which is slated for a global release from November.
It’s been a decade since Kate Reid opened a tiny patisserie in the south-east Melbourne suburb of Elwood. She’s since relocated to Fitzroy, then expanded to the CBD and across state lines to sunny Brisbane, setting up shop in both South Brisbane and the CBD. And a Sydney croissanterie is planned for 2023.
But now, Reid doesn’t just want to sell you her cream-of-the-crop croissants – perhaps the best in the world. She wants to teach you how to make them.
“Agreeing to this was me signing a contract with myself that I would develop a recipe that would make it fully achievable for the home cook,” she tells Broadsheet.
Just before Melbourne went into its final lockdown last year, Reid met for coffee with Nat Paull – the woman behind beloved, recently closed bakery Beatrix and its cake-baking bible. “She said, ‘You have no idea how much this is going to drain your soul.’” Paull was right.
“It was so much bigger than I could’ve ever envisaged,” says the ever-hands-on Reid, who is not only Lune’s tour de force founder, but still pens every single Instagram post herself.
What fills the pages of her suitably sexy debut cookbook – published by Hardie Grant’s UK arm – could be described as Lune’s greatest hits. “I looked at a catalogue of everything that’s ever been on the counter at Lune and picked out around 60 recipes.”
The collection proves that croissants – and what can be created, cleverly, with the same pastry – have a pull way beyond breakfast time. Hence the name: All Day, All Night.
So, the cookbook’s cornerstone is the base dough recipe, which is completely different to the one the Lune team uses. Reid had to re-engineer it during lockdown.
In the early development days, she says, “I was terrified I couldn’t deliver.” She spent weeks picking up kilos of dough from Lune every morning and experimenting with different lamination techniques (the process of folding and rolling butter into dough over and over again to create super-thin layers). None of them worked.
Then she realised: it was the dough. It worked in a commercial setting, but not at home.
The recipe she landed on is comprehensive, conversational and 20 pages long. “It’s challenging, it takes time, you need to be detail-oriented, but it’s achievable,” she says. “I want people to feel like I’m standing in the kitchen with them holding their hand.”
But don’t be alarmed. Those pages cover all the nuts and bolts – including manageable instructions for batching it up and rolling it out – plus the different shapes and sizes (including a Lune invention, the cruffin, whose recipe has been top secret until now).
Once you’ve nailed the foundations, “The world’s your oyster,” Reid says. “These are 60 [recipe] suggestions, but I really want [them] to inspire people. There are no rules. I want people to think outside of the box with what they can do with croissant pastry.”
But if the prospect of spending three or four days making pastry is too overwhelming for you, the chapter dedicated to twice-baked croissants has a golden hack. “You can go down to your local bakery, get a croissant and turn it into any of Lune’s iconic twice-bakeds” – like the show-stopping almond variation. It’s the ideal shortcut.
You’ll also find a leftovers chapter featuring recipes for croissant biscotti and croutons, and even a bread-and-butter pudding (“You can make a dinner-party dessert with scraps of croissant pastry”). Plus, a creamy fish pie that once featured on the Lune Lab menu.
And then there are the visuals. Spectacular photography by Melbourne photographer – and Broadsheet contributor – Pete Dillon shines throughout, which makes it as much a coffee-table book as a cookbook. The pre-Christmas release was no coincidence.
“As I was writing it, I had this vision of it wrapped up under Christmas trees all over the world,” says Reid.
“I don’t know if that will happen, but just the thought of it gives me goosebumps.”
Lune: Croissants All Day, All Night, published by Hardie Grant Books (UK), will be released in Australia on November 3. Pre-order online.
