Production

Franzbrötchen Formula in Baker's Percent: Laminated Dough with Cinnamon Sugar

By Robert Roessler, Food Scientist · Published 14 November 2026

The Franzbrötchen is a German pastry made from a laminated yeast dough, rolled up with cinnamon sugar. This page gives the formula in baker's percent, the working values of a bakery that freezes the raw pieces and proofs them straight from the freezer, and the faults to watch.

The formula

The table gives the home recipe for a laminated yeast dough, scaled to 500 g of flour. In the recipe, 400 g of flour take 200 g of milk, 25 g of sugar, 30 g of fresh yeast, 40 g of butter, 10 g of salt, 6 g of malt extract and 170 g of butter for the turns, and 100 g of sugar with 5 g of cinnamon for the filling. Milk is 200 ÷ 400 × 100 = 50 %, the lamination butter is 170 ÷ 400 × 100 = 42.5 %, and the filling sugar is 100 ÷ 400 × 100 = 25 %. The dough alone is 220.25 %, the same as the croissant dough. With the filling the formula adds up to 246.5 %.

Scaled to bakery batches

How the numbers are calculated

1. Add the percentages. 100 + 50 + 6.25 + 7.5 + 10 + 2.5 + 1.5 + 42.5 + 25 + 1.25 = 246.5 %. Total dough weight is always flour weight × 2.465.
2. From the dough you want to the flour you need. Flour = dough weight ÷ 2.465. For 100 rolls of 128 g you need 12,800 g of dough, so 12,800 ÷ 2.465 = 5,193 g of flour.
3. From the flour to each ingredient. Ingredient = flour × percent ÷ 100. With 5,193 g of flour: whole milk 2,596 g, sugar in the dough 325 g, fresh yeast 389 g, butter in the dough 519 g, salt 130 g, malt extract 78 g, lamination butter 2,207 g, sugar for the filling 1,298 g, cinnamon for the filling 65 g.
4. Pieces from a batch. 10 kg of flour makes 24,650 g of dough. At 128 g per piece that is 192 pieces.

You can do the same with the baker's percentage calculator: enter the percentages above and tick flour and liquid.

Decoration

Decoration is part of the formula. For the Franzbrötchen the cinnamon sugar in the filling is the whole flavour of the product, so it belongs in the formula and in the costing. Nothing is added to the baked roll: no glaze, no icing and no powdered sugar, and the rolls are not brushed with egg wash. The filling is already in the formula table above.

• Ratio: 100 g of sugar to 5 g of cinnamon, which is 20 to 1. Mix them well before you spread them on the dough sheet.
• Amount: about 14 g of cinnamon sugar per roll. The amount per roll is a calculation from the formula (a roll of 128 g raw dough contains about 10.6 % filling), not a weighed value.
• Often forgotten: in many bakeries the filling is forgotten in the costing, even though it is more than a tenth of the roll weight. Count it as an ingredient.

In the bakery

• Weights. The finished roll weighs 110 g. With a baking loss of 14 %, the raw piece has to weigh about 128 g (110 ÷ 0.86). In a home recipe, 881 g of dough plus 105 g of filling are cut into 12 pieces of about 82 g. The bakery makes larger rolls, so a batch of that size gives only about 7 to 8 of them.
• Yeast. 7.5 % fresh yeast is a high amount. It is needed because the dough is laminated and carries a thick, fatty filling. There is no extra yeast for freezing.
• Dough production is the same as for the croissant. Keep the dough cold, about 19 °C, and the lamination butter or fat at the same temperature, neither warmer nor colder. The room should not be much warmer than 22 °C. Mix only 2 to 3 minutes and do not knead. Give three simple turns, which is the simplest and the best method. A puff pastry gets double turns, but not this dough. Rest the dough in the cooler at about 6 °C: 30 minutes after the butter is enclosed, at least 30 minutes after turn 1 and turn 2, and 1 to 2 hours after turn 3. Make the dough the day before.
• Shaping (home recipe). Roll the cold dough to 2 to 3 mm and 30 to 33 cm wide, spread the cinnamon sugar and roll it to 40 cm so that the sugar is pressed in. Roll it up tightly from the long side with a little tension and the seam at the bottom. Cut pieces 4 cm wide and press each one in the middle with a wooden stick. In the home recipe there are four variants, with the cut side up or down and with the pressing before or after the proof. Pressing after the proof gives a larger volume in the oven.
• In the bakery a machine does the pressing, before freezing. The pieces are pressed raw and then frozen without proofing.
• Freezing. Freeze the raw pieces in a blast freezer at about −23 °C so that the water freezes quickly and the gluten network is damaged as little as possible. Do not just put them in the freezer. They keep for at most 14 days and are usually used up by day 10. Do not leave them standing outside when you move them.
• Proof. The frozen pieces go straight onto trays and into the proofer for 45 minutes. The proofer is the same one as for the other products, at 37 °C and 85 to 89 % humidity. They are only proofed there and then baked. Too much proof is a typical fault. This is longer than for the croissant, which goes into the proofer for only about 20 minutes.
• Baking. 185 °C in a fan oven, in practice usually a rack oven, for 30 minutes. The home recipe says 190 °C and 20 to 25 minutes, and it is a good starting point. Give only very little steam, because the cinnamon sugar is on the surface and would get wet. The general rule still holds: steam goes in when you load, the draft is pulled after about one minute, and there is never steam at the end of the bake.

Things to watch

• The dough is laminated wrongly: the turns fail, or the layers fuse. Give three simple turns and keep to the rests. Cut cleanly with a sharp knife, because a dull knife smears the layers.
• Wrong butter or wrong fat: a lamination fat that is too soft or too hard does not work. Use a fat that suits the process and keep it at the same temperature as the dough.
• Damaged raw materials: faults in storage, for example flour or butter that was kept too warm or too long, show up in the finished roll.
• Wrong make-up: pieces cut or pressed unevenly give different sizes and uneven baking, and pieces that are touched too much lose their layers.
• Frozen wrongly: pieces only put into the freezer instead of the blast freezer freeze slowly, and large ice crystals damage the gluten network. Pieces left outside for too long while they are moved start to thaw and proof too early.
• Proof too long: over-proofed pieces lose their shape and their layers. Keep to the 45 minutes in the proofer and do not leave the trays standing.
• Wrong baking programme: the wrong temperature, time or steam gives pale, dry or dark rolls. Check the programme before each batch.
• The cinnamon sugar is not right: too little or too much cinnamon, or a mixture that was not mixed well, gives a flat taste or a harsh one. Weigh the mixture each time.

Sources

• King Arthur Baking: Baker's Percentage (professional reference)
• BAKERpedia: Baker's Percent

Information current as of 14 November 2026. The formula is a starting point and needs your own trials with your flour, mixer and oven.