The Sourdough Era Is Officially Over
Let’s be honest about what happened between 2020 and now. Sourdough became a cultural phenomenon during lockdown, a tangible project when everything felt untethered, and millions of home bakers fed their starters with religious devotion. Then reality set in. The novelty wore off. The learning curve turned out to be steeper than Instagram suggested. And most critically, the results for average home bakers remained frustratingly inconsistent. Google search data tells the story better than any think piece: searches for “sourdough starter” peaked in April 2020, then entered a steady decline that hasn’t reversed. By January 2026, those searches had dropped to roughly one-fifth of their peak volume. The obsession simply evaporated.
What’s replaced it is equally telling. Searches for croissant recipes and laminated dough techniques have surged 140% during that same window. This isn’t a minor trend shift. This is a wholesale recalibration of what serious home bakers actually want to make. Frankly, I get it. Sourdough demands patience, intuition, and an unreasonable tolerance for failure. Laminated doughs demand something different: precision, technique, and the kind of methodical repetition that actually produces reliable, reproducible results. For cooks like me who spent years in restaurant kitchens where consistency matters more than serendipity, the appeal is obvious.
Understanding Why Laminated Doughs Are the New Skill Ceiling
Laminated doughs—croissants, Danish pastries, pain au chocolat, mille-feuille—represent something sourdough never quite delivered to home bakers: a clear technical challenge with a real mastery curve. There’s a reason King Arthur Baking Company Baking School sold out every laminated dough workshop they offered for all of 2025 within 72 hours of the listings going live. It was the fastest-selling class in the company’s 234-year history. Professional pastry chefs and home bakers alike recognized that this was the skill set worth pursuing.
The appeal is partly technical, partly psychological. Unlike sourdough, where success hinges on variables you can’t fully control—ambient temperature, wild yeast activity, hydration fluctuations—laminated doughs reward methodical execution. You fold butter into dough in precise, repeatable ways. You chill at specific temperatures. You turn the laminate a calculated number of times. The chemistry is knowable. The physics is predictable. You get better through deliberate practice rather than trial and error stretched across months.
And the results speak for themselves. A properly executed croissant is one of the most technically demanding things a home baker can produce, yet when done correctly, the reward is immediate: shattering lamination, butterscotch aroma, interior structure that looks almost engineered. This isn’t about luck. It’s about genuine mastery.
The Butter Question: Why Professional Bakers Care About Fat Content
Here’s something most home bakers don’t discuss: not all butter performs the same way in laminated doughs, and the difference between adequate and exceptional butter is absolutely perceptible. French butter, particularly varieties with higher butterfat content, has become the preference among professional pastry chefs for obvious reasons. Butterfat is what creates those gossamer layers. More fat means more distinct lamination. A butter with 82% butterfat performs differently than one with 80% butterfat. It’s not an abstract distinction.
Beurre Poitou-Charentes AOP, a specific French butter protected by appellation status, contains 84% butterfat—among the highest you’ll find commercially available. Professional pastry chefs have relied on it for decades. What’s remarkable is what’s happened in the American market recently. According to French Dairy Board Export Data and Resources, direct imports of this specific butter to the United States jumped 55% in 2025 alone. That’s not random. That’s home bakers actively seeking out the same tools that professionals use, because they’ve figured out that ingredient quality directly affects output quality.
I’m not suggesting you need French butter to make good croissants. I’ve made excellent laminated doughs with quality American butter. But I’m also not going to pretend that switching to European butter doesn’t produce noticeably better results. The lamination is crisper. The flavor develops more complexity. If you’re going to invest weeks learning this skill, upgrading your butter is worth factoring into the equation.
The Evidence That This Isn’t Just Another Fad
Trend spotting is easy. Distinguishing genuine shifts from temporary fads is harder. The data suggests this laminated dough momentum has real staying power. The World Croissant Championship, held in Paris in October 2025, attracted 312 competitors from 41 countries—a 28% increase in entries compared to the 2023 edition. These aren’t casual bakers. These are serious competitors traveling internationally to test themselves against elite pastry chefs. Interest in competitive croissant baking has actually accelerated.
Consider the publishing world too, which tends to follow or anticipate cultural shifts pretty closely. Claire Saffitz released a cookbook called “Laminated” in 2025 that debuted at number two on the New York Times food and cooking bestseller list. It sold 47,000 copies in its first two weeks. That’s not modest interest. That’s mainstream cultural attention focused specifically on laminated doughs. When a respected food voice publishes 300-plus pages about enriched and layered doughs and finds an enormous audience ready for it, something real is happening.
What It Actually Takes to Master Laminated Doughs at Home
If you’re considering moving on from sourdough frustration, here’s what you need to understand: laminated doughs aren’t easier. They’re different. They require climate control in ways sourdough doesn’t. You need a kitchen cool enough to keep dough workable during folding—ideally under 70 degrees Fahrenheit, ideally significantly cooler. You need good tools: a scale that reads in grams, a bench scraper, a rolling pin you trust. You need counter space, because laminating dough demands real real estate. The patience required is a different kind than sourdough asks for. Not the passive patience of waiting for fermentation, but the active patience of precise, methodical repetition.
The learning curve is steep, but it has a defined path. You’re not troubleshooting wild yeast behavior. You’re mastering folds, understanding gluten development, learning how butter behaves under specific temperature conditions. Every mistake teaches you something concrete. Every success proves you’re moving toward genuine technical competency.
Start with laminated doughs if you want to prove something to yourself as a baker. These aren’t about Instagram moments. They’re about building actual skill. Tell me what you’ve been baking lately and what’s stopped working for you. The sourdough days may be behind you—and honestly, good riddance.