We used to get them sometimes in Essex Cty NJ. I am sure they do them elsewhere. They are rolled up like a croisant but they are plain bread w/o butter or anything else. They were flaky and broke nice.
I am hoping to find a recipe or formula. I honestly cannot find much by searching online.
Thanks.
For instance, our Betty Crocker cookbook from 1976 has a recipe for dinner rolls and instructions for making several different shapes, including crescent rolls. If you have a roll recipe that you like, you can use it to make crescent rolls. If you don’t, here's one to try:
https://preppykitchen.com/crescent-rolls/
Paul
IMGKR, when you say "they are plain bread w/o butter or anything else", do you mean the dough is not enriched? Or, do you mean they just don't contain the amount of butter a croissant does? I doubt if you can get "flaky" with plain bread dough. Paul's recipe looks good, but it's enriched with eggs, milk & fat.
Since croissants get their flakiness from laminating & cooling layers of butter, I asked if that effect could be achieved without butter. Not really. Fat is still required, but in lesser quantity. A thin layer can be spread over the dough, then folded & refrigerated, a few times. In the case of butter, it can be melted and brushed on the dough before laminating. That would allow the least amount of fat and still keep the layers separated.
AI had another method without any folding: when the dough is rolled out for shaping brush butter and a touch of flour over the surface before rolling up. That will keep the layers separated.
Good luck with your search. My husband likes Pillsbury crescent rolls, so I think I'm going to try Paul's link. Maybe I'll split the batch and try a few laminations on one half.
I had a neighbor that used to make dinner rolls and she called them "butterhorns". They were made with a dough that was like a parker house roll, ingredient-wise-they had butter and egg and sugar in the dough, but they were definitely a dinner roll. She would roll out a circle of dough and cut it into triangles and roll them up like a crescent roll. I made something similar, once, with my favorite brioche dough and added butter to the top of the circle before rolling them up into crescents. Wonderful!
https://www.tasteofmemories.com/hungarian-crescent-rolls/
I'm pretty sure I also have some recipes in my Jewish baking books. LMK if the above doesn't do it for you.
David
Crescent v Croissant is he most common result from searching crescent roll. :-/
My dad told a story about how they were "invented" in the Austro-Hungarian empire and baked in a crescent form as a silent warning to the people that the Ottoman's were going to attack. Yea he was full of it like that. Anyway.....
It was butter and fat free, or fat was so minimal you'd never think it was in there if you did not know some breads use fat. It was a surprise to me when I started baking sandwich bread.
Maybe flaky is the wrong word. You could unroll it some to break pieces off not unlike how a folded Kaiser roll can be unfolded. It also had a dark dry crust.They were just right to break and put a pat of butter on the end to eat.
David I may try that later in the week. It looks close. I'll probably use malt powder instead of sugar.
Those rolls, or something much like them, were always available at our Jewish bakery when I was a child. Some had seeds. Some had coarse salt. My recollection is that they may have been slightly enriched, may be with an egg. They could be unrolled. The crumb was "shreddable," like challah. I'm going to look in some of my baking books ...
Okay! "Inside the Jewish Bakery" by Ginsberg and Berg has a recipe for "Salt Sticks and Poppy Horns." It uses their "light enriched dough with one egg." That's exactly the roll I remember! And, FWIW, their recipe calls for both sugar and malt (dry or syrup).
This book is unfortunately out of print, however Stan Ginsberg hangs out on his web site <theryebaker.com> and might have the recipe to share with you.
David
I searched salt sticks and poppy horns and got this bakery at the top. they say they use hard roll dough. AFAIK hard roll is another term for Kaiser roll. They look right. bottom of that page. https://jaroschbakery.com/baked-goods/tasty-daily-specials/
Edit 12-30-25 I sent them an email this morning to see if they would share the hard roll recipe. :-) I won't hold my breath.
1-11-26 They replied sorry cannot give you recipe.
I went with the Hungarian recipe which does not contain an egg, instead of the preppy recipe which does. Dough is on first rise now. It contains a fair bit of butter (20%), so I won't bother doing any laminations, just follow the recipe. Will report back.
I'm not trying to horn in on your thread, just thought this might be useful. I used the Hungarian recipe. They turned out quite well, fairly light, but definitely breadlike. I'm not too sure what exactly to expect, but they taste good. They look like dolphins. 😊
Cool Moe! I tried it too. :-)
I used avacado oil instead of butter and diastatic malt powder instead of sugar. Baked at 400 10 minutes then rotate pan bake 10 more minutes. They are crisp, somehow buttery and salty. Not exactly what I was thinking of but nice. I'll make them again. I was thinking maybe an egg in the dough might make it more like what I was thinking of. Here are some pictures. I did not cut the pieces evenly. It just occurred to me that the Kaiser roll dough might work for what I want. Edit- I forgot to mention I sprayed them with water before putting them in the oven.
Apparently any hard roll/Kaiser roll recipe/formula will suffice for this. I made some with Floyd's kaiser roll recipe haven't tasted them yet but they look ok. I made those rolls before so they will probably eat the same.