Mashed with a muffin. Bedazzled with rainbow sprinkles. Shrunk to $50 boxes of petite céréale. And now, flattened and adorned with all manner of outrageous toppings.
Who knew the croissant was such a reinventionist?
For centuries, the viennoiserie has been an elegant display of French craft and simplicity. But just in time for the Olympic Games in Paris this summer, which kick off on July 26, the croissant seems to be donning its party clothes and going on a bender.
“I’ve always been obsessed with croissants,” says Sophie Smith, owner of Butter Crumble in San Francisco, which has a rotating menu consisting of the likes of bacon, egg and cheese croissants, strawberry vanilla cruffins and other laminated pastries. “Whether it’s shapes you create, or the fillings you put in before or after it bakes, there are endless ways to be creative with croissant dough.”
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Like many French things, the croissant is created with equal parts substance and style. But the pastry is actually an Austrian invention. It is said to have been around as early as the 13th century, made from a yeasted dough and known as a kipferi. Stories vary, but it was likely an Austrian artillery officer who brought the pastry to Paris in the 19th century, where it was eventually rechristened as the “croissant” owing to its crescent shape. In 1915, a baker by the name of Sylvain Claudius Goy used laminated yeast dough instead of the denser brioche-like dough, transforming the Austrian pastry into today’s light and flaky, billowy, and buttery French version.
For many bakers, perfecting the croissant is a source of pride. “The best croissant makers ultimately just have an appreciation for the craft,” says James Beard award-nominated pastry chef Nora Allen of Mel the Bakery in Hudson, NY. As well they should—the process is notoriously labor-intensive, time-consuming, and subject to the whims of the weather. Lamination includes folding butter (preferably French) into dough again and again, creating the many billowy-on-the-inside and flaky-on-the-outside layers that implode when bitten into, before being shaped, proofed, and baked. While the technique is textbook, taking up to three days to produce, there are variations that enable each baker to create nuances in balance, structure, and flavor profile.
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“I just want to make something that people will enjoy with high-quality ingredients. To me, that’s classic and that’s timeless,” says Allen, who eschews the many croissant crazes. But while she and other bakers see no need to mess with a classic, judging by the 7.5 billion views of #croissant content on TikTok, the masses are eating up these newer trends.
“A lot of bakeries are having fun these days,” says Butter Crumble’s Smith, who grew up considering croissants and potential flavor pairings. “We take inspiration from sandwiches and our favorite pasta dishes and try to apply those flavors to the blank canvas of the croissant dough.” It seems to be what customers want, given the bakery typically sells out by early afternoon.
The appetite for experimentation can be traced directly to one Frenchman who made a name for himself in New York City. Dominique Ansel grew up and went to culinary school in a small town north of Paris. After eight years of working for the French pâtisserie Fauchon and six years for Daniel Boulud at the renowned restaurant Daniel in New York, he opened his eponymous bakery in West Soho in 2011. Two years later it, and he, went viral when he invented the cronut, a cream-filled, sugar-rolled, glaze-topped croissant-donut hybrid that comes out in a new unique flavor each and every month. The mashup was an anomaly for some time, as bakers resisted the temptation of messing with a classic. But the knockoffs soon began.
The cronut begat the cruffin which begat the crookie. The crescent has become circular, square, and cubed. Chocolate batons and almond crème, once the only ingredients worthy of inhabiting croissants, have been overridden by everything from black sesame and tahini to dulce de leche to Fruity Pebbles. Bakers have been liberated from tradition.
“I think Dominique Ansel is a Thomas Keller-like figure for pastry in the sense that he has sort of dictated more playfulness,” Allen says of the American chef who is known for creativity as much as technique. She also acknowledges that Ansel decided to “break the rules,” but has done so in a well-executed kind of way, which makes it okay.
It’s a perspective echoed by many bakers. “I didn’t realize how sacred the croissant is,” says Ashley Coiffard of Brooklyn’s wildly popular L’Appartement 4F bakery. After she and her French husband, Gautier, found success selling baguettes and croissants from their apartment during the pandemic, she thought it would be fun to create mini croissants. “Gautier said no for long time. He thought it was disgraceful to change the croissant that much.”
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But after a while, having perfected his regular croissant recipe, he decided to take on the challenge. Making cereal with teeny, dehydrated croissants was conceived as a reward for their Kickstarter campaign to raise money to open a bakery. Two years later, the cereal remains their signature item. “We have people on our team whose job it is just to roll mini croissants all day.”
While tons of bakeries are having plenty of fun dressing up—and sizing down—their croissants, many also draw the line at the current flat croissant trend. “We’re definitely inspired, and I love seeing what everyone else is doing,” says Ashley Coiffard. “Even if we would never do it, it’s fun to see someone totally flatten a croissant.”
Indeed while croissant classicists cringe at flat croissants, crookies, and anything that smacks too much of a ploy, they recognize that it breathes new life into the craft. “Pastry chefs and bakers are more empowered to be bold in breaking the traditions. That element of the trend is really, really cool,” says Allen. “But I think like with anything, if something is made just to be a trend then it’s like, is it actually good? That’s the ultimate question.”