As I write this story, I sit at my remote “office,” a local bakery called Cou Cou Rachou, with an empty plate save the shattered crumbs of the croissant I just inhaled. I’ve been eating many more of these French pastries since the Paris Olympics started and even got smart about convincing my family to join me.
Guys, I’m feeling cooped up. Let’s go for a walk… turns into a stroll to croissants.
Let’s make a quick stop at the farmers market… turns into a quick stop for croissants.
I could use another coffee… turns into another croissant, too.
The magic of a very good croissant is catching—they happily go along on these pastry-filled excursions, and we’ve become quite picky about them.
If you ask 100 pastry chefs to name their favorite croissant, you’ll get 100 different answers. The only answer I personally care about is from the award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel, inventor of the famous cronut and maker of my favorite croissant. So I asked him.
“When I was a young apprentice just starting out in France, I worked at Peltier, which at the time was one of the oldest bakeries in Paris. This was about 25 years ago. I’ll remember those croissants for the rest of my life.”
Chef Ansel says that for a pastry chef, the quest for the perfect croissant is a decades-long journey that requires patience and practice—”it’s perhaps the single hardest thing to master.” Only then are they rewarded with a tall, flaky, golden pastry that somehow shatters into shard-like crumbs and melts in your mouth at the same time. And it’s delicious, with the softest trace of yeasty sweetness from the levain (starter) and butter.
Even after decades of slogging with the surprisingly simple ingredients—butter, flour, water, eggs, sugar, milk, and salt—Chef Ansel still checks the cross-sections of the croissants sold at all of his bakeries.
Below, take a look at the screenshot he sent me from his phone—the honeycomb shape of the cross-sections tells him whether or not the croissant was laminated, shaped, and proofed correctly, and even down to the oven’s temperature.
Dominique Ansel
A pastry as miraculous as a croissant should be left to the pros to make. I will happily continue traipsing through town in search of another butter-scented bakery.
How do you spot a lousy croissant behind a pastry case?
Chef Ansel says, “If it looks dull, flat, doughy, or floppy vs. golden and flaky with all those tall layers and a crisp crust, it’s probably not going to be good.”
He also recommends that you avoid day-old croissants. “You’ve got to eat a croissant the same day it’s baked. The best croissants are fresh-baked, eaten as soon as possible, and there’s a fleeting moment to enjoy them.”
“When you bite into a well-made croissant, there should be crumbs everywhere. There’s no way to hide the evidence.” And that’s how I knew the croissant I ate while writing this story was good—my keyboard and jeans are covered in crumbs.
Evan Sung
