I left the bustle of Petitgrain Boulangerie in Santa Monica, California, with a plain croissant still hot from the oven, and though I tried to let it cool, I couldn’t.
The outside shattered into so many fine, crisp, delicate layers across a tender, bubbled honeycomb — delicious, with the softest trace of yeast and a bronzed, malty sweetness. As it collapsed between my teeth, it puffed warm, butter-scented air that made it feel like I wasn’t just eating this croissant, but breathing it in.
Fingers shining with fat, jeans covered in crumbs, I started to imagine, just for a second, what it would look like if I rearranged my life and moved to this side of town, in walking distance to this bakery. It felt so good to be reminded that in the competitive and often absurd era of extreme croissants, a plain one could have this effect.
Petitgrain Boulangerie, a small neighborhood bakery in Santa Monica, Calif., didn’t design its pastries for virality. The bakery has steadily increased its production, now making about 600 pastries a day. The plain croissant is not, at a glance, thrilling. It doesn’t have the whirling geometry of a Suprême croissant or the show-off shell of some just-gone-viral hybrid, which knows from which angle it wants to be photographed. It is not dramatically constricted, uniformly shaped, caramelized or colored. The plain croissant wasn’t made for the camera.
A crescent-shaped bread arrived with Austrian bakers at the 1889 Paris Exposition, but the croissant stepped into its full power a few decades later, when French bakers started shaping it using a laminated dough.
Cooks were already familiar with lamination, the technique of layering fat between dough. They used it to build texture in phyllo, paratha, bing and other sheeted, folded and coiled breads. But the dough for croissants was laminated and yeasted — fussy, needy, demanding and, when every step went right, spectacular.
In the oven, tiny amounts of water in the butter vaporised, leaving behind airy, bread-like pockets inside the croissant and a rich, pastry-like flakiness on the outside. These layers that contained the pastry’s pleasures were partly visible, but fully revealed themselves only in the eating, in private, buttery communion — a brief synthesis of texture, flavor and scent.
Any pastry can be crisp, or soft. But to somehow be both? This is still the magic of a very good plain croissant, the way it can embody such a mind-boggling extent of textures within just a few bites, from the dark, crackling crisp of its edge, to the pale, weightless puff of its honeycomb.
I called Clémence de Lutz, who opened the neighborhood bakery Petitgrain with her partner, Tony Hernandez, in May. De Lutz also operates a Los Angeles cooking school, where she has been teaching baking classes for over a decade. She uses French butter from Isigny Sainte-Mère to laminate croissant dough, and works with local flours, including some whole grains, from Tehachapi Grain Project as well as the Pasadena mill Grist & Toll.
“You can get a perfect technical croissant with white flour,” she said, “but no flavor.” It made me think about how we can’t see the most exciting advances in croissant making. But every day, bakers are slogging their way through challenging doughs made with vegan butters, fermentations, whole grains and alternative flours, stubbornly insisting on refining and customizing the plain croissant’s flavors and textures — not its form.
De Lutz has consulted behind the scenes as a kind of croissant whisperer for other chefs, but with their own pastries, she and Hernandez were baking to their own tastes. They did not design a pastry case with virality in mind. Still, they’ve had to steadily increase the bakery’s production to keep up with demand, now baking close to 600 pastries throughout the day.
On my most recent visit, Wilshire Boulevard smelled of roasting fruit and butter. Through the glass, I could see a cook carrying sheet pans of pastries from the back of the kitchen, restocking.
It was a delight to see people in line — the plain croissant still had its fans! But as I studied the small crowd and did the math, it was also a little alarming: What if there wasn’t one left for me by the time I got inside?
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