Last year, I felt cheated when New York restaurant Lafayette sent me a box of its much-talked-about Supreme pastries. This was the pastry people had been lining up for hours for (a refusal to do after my Cronut experience) and raving about, a beautifully swirled pastry topped with a mind-blowing ganache. It had been featured on TV, taken TikTok by storm, and kicked off a croissant craze. But I was lucky enough to have four delivered straight to my apartment. Such are the perks of being a food writer, I thought to myself.
But the moment I took a bite, I knew something was wrong. The Fibonacci beauty of the laminated swirls gave way to a taste of pure butter smeared with wet paper. Though it was certainly flaky, the croissant felt heavy and dense, and I gave up after about a third of the way through. Though taste is subjective, I found myself increasingly annoyed by the pastry design and every croissant trend I saw afterwards. There were triangular onigiri croissants (I hate to say it out loud, but onigiri croissants), cube croissants, croissants with crumbled cookie dough on top, and so on. With each iteration, I ask myself: why use croissant dough if it’s not going to make it shine? It looks cool, but at what cost?
I’m no pastry chef, but after taking one croissant-making class with my mom this winter, I understand how laminated dough works. Croissants get their signature texture by layering butter between dough layers, then folding it over and over until it’s filled with hundreds of tiny layers. During baking, the moisture in the butter evaporates, tearing the dough apart to create the fluffy, flaky sheets.
But perfect cylindrical or cube-shaped croissants are made in tight molds that, at some point, prevent those layers from rising as they would if there was nothing on the baking sheet. This often has some negative effects: the layers look cool, pressed against nice sides and edges, but because there’s no space between the layers, the steam from the butter has nowhere to escape. Often this results in a denser, oilier pastry, the opposite of what a croissant should be at its best: full of butter and with plenty of space between the layers. The same thing happens when bakers try to overwork a croissant, for example by piling a heavy cookie dough on top: the layers stop rising.
The point of these trends is to play with texture and appearance. (Of course, there are laminated pastries that still require a mold, like kouign amann, but the key is that the mold is just on the side, allowing the layered pastry to pop out from the top, rather than being trapped as if you were wearing pants two sizes too small.) Done well, these pastries can offer light layers and a satisfying buttery crunch. And if you don’t meet that requirement, but still love the denser, smoother pastries that come out of these molds, there are clearly plenty of people who agree with you.
But I look forward to the day when taste and texture take precedence over appearance, or at least the day when people looking for a rich pastry no longer have to rely on croissant dough. Danishes are on the way!
