The city’s top-ranked croissant is only available two days a week, is made to a strictly kosher recipe and comes from a self-taught baker. We stepped inside the bakery to see how this prize-winning pastry is made.
“A croissant doesn’t lie.” Butter, flour, heat and time are the key components of this classic pastry but, like most simple recipes, it’s one of the most difficult to master. Self-taught baker Maaryasha Werdiger knows this all too well.
“Anything that happens at any level along the way, it will show you at the end,” she says.
It could be Werdiger’s humility that led her tiny Ripponlea bakery, Zelda, to earn top spot in a blind-tasting of 23 croissants by Good Food earlier this year.
“Every single bake, I’m always looking and saying, how can we make this better?
“Being obsessive over this stuff and trying to get it right, that’s like our [team’s] idea of fun.”
Eight years ago, she attempted to make her first croissant as she threw herself into a home-baking hobby while working as a paediatric physiotherapist and raising three young boys.
“I didn’t have any equipment – I didn’t even have a ruler,” she says, incredulous at her naivety. A ruler ensures the right ratio of butter to pastry and makes a well-formed croissant with even layers. “I didn’t have a prover. I didn’t have anything!”
But, spurred on by an obsessive personality, Werdiger started running bread-baking classes for friends, then sold her bread and cakes by word of mouth and, later, set up a tiny bakery in her garage. The Zelda shopfront opened four years ago.
Earlier this year, Good Food’s panel of blind-tasters praised Zelda’s croissant for its buttery aroma, delicate texture and caramelised crust. After being named number one, the bakery’s croissant sales quadrupled.
Aside from Werdiger’s persistence, what goes into making this croissant?
Battles with butter
Zelda’s recipe is similar to most other Melbourne bakeries, Werdiger says, except for one key aspect. Running a kosher operation means that the chief ingredient of a croissant – the butter – cannot be sourced from most of Australia’s dairies.
“The kosher dairy [industry] is very small,” she says. “It’s like only one small business [in Australia] and it doesn’t have sophisticated equipment because there’s not the demand for it.”
Most bakeries in Melbourne can order big flat sheets of butter specifically designed for making laminated doughs, including croissant dough. These sheets not only have the right malleability and melting point, they also make it more efficient to layer the butter between sheets of dough, a fundamental step in croissant-making.
“It reduces the variables, and it makes a more consistent croissant,” says Werdiger. At Zelda, the team create their own sheets every Monday using the kosher-certified butter. (Werdiger didn’t want to print the name of her small butter supplier, lest the business gets overwhelmed with inquiries).
Marching to your own beat
Zelda might be the only bakery in Melbourne that’s closed on a Saturday, while its local community observes the Sabbath. It’s also only open two days a week, Wednesday and Friday.
But from Monday to Friday, staff wearing tie-dye aprons are crammed into the 50-square-metre space mixing doughs, keeping an eye on the provers and juggling dozens of different items in various stages of readiness across three ovens.
“I pushed the space so hard we don’t have room to open on other days,” says Werdiger. “You can’t even open the door on Thursday. There are just crates with bread proving, and trolleys with products, and the fridges are full.”
“Being obsessive over this stuff and trying to get it right, that’s like our [team’s] idea of fun.”
Zelda owner Maaryasha Werdiger
Werdiger believes the tight workspace and small team – six full-time bakers including her – are key to Zelda’s quality. Communication about each step from mixing to laminating, proving and baking is easier in a small team. “We all work right next to each other,” she says. “From beginning to end, there’s care taken.”
There are also no wholesale orders that need to be factored into their schedule; they can simply bake when things are ready, and wait if the time’s not right. Commercially, that model may not make sense for other bakeries.
(Werdiger’s grandmother is Nechama Werdiger, a billionaire with interests in property who appeared at No. 112 on the 2025 AFR Rich List, but she does not fund the bakery.)
Letting the croissant rule
The Zelda croissant has a few other quirks. The team mix the dough at a set time of day. They only bake croissants in one particular oven, despite having two ovens designed for pastry. And the croissants prove very slowly, an adaptation that’s driven by the lower melting point of the kosher butter.
Good Food’s panel of tasters identified a toasted grain flavour, which Werdiger is thrilled to hear. It turns out she adds a little malt to the dough, a legacy from her garage baking days when her husband was a brewer and would bring home different malts for her to experiment with.
At the end of the day, every croissant reflects a baker’s own tastes, preferences and schedule. Zelda’s – kosher and baked two days a week to a self-taught recipe – just happens to be downright delicious.
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Emma Breheny – Emma is Good Food’s Melbourne eating out and restaurant editor and editor of The Age Good Food Guide.
