Beware: Fake Croissants
It’s quite something with that French patisserie. If the butter isn’t too expensive, then the vanilla is scarce. Or – equally terrible – no baker has an artisan-baked croissant on offer anymore. One baker from Nice, Frédéric Roy, is sounding the alarm to save this piece of French culinary heritage.
‘De la merde‘, is what Roy calls the croissant that the average French baker treats their customers to. Factory-made baking rubbish. He thinks it’s a disgrace. Because the croissant, that is France. He momentarily forgets that the French probably weren’t the inventors of the croissant at all; that would have been the Austrians.
Flaky
But soit. He’s right. In self-proclaimed croissant country France, a good artisan-made butter croissant has become as rare as McDo is ubiquitous there now. Especially since butter prices have soared. Fake instead of flaky croissants fill the rustic bread baskets.
The baker claims that 85% of the patisserie sold in France comes from factories. The modern-day Asterix made the international press with his crusade against the factory-made croissant, often containing margarine, which began with an open letter to the French prime minister warning that the country’s patisserie was in great danger.
The French government reacted immediately and proclaimed a week of taste (la semaine du goût), to teach the French once again what real flavour is. But this doesn’t go far enough for Roy. He wants the government, as it did earlier with the baguette, which once found itself in the same boat, to develop a special label for the traditional croissant.
Croissant tradition
This label should guarantee that it contains no additives or margarine. Instead, the croissant tradition should contain only top-quality butter with a local appellation (AOP) and be baked in the bakery itself, rather than par-baked in a factory and cosmetically finished in the bakery. Government intervention has definitely put the baguette tradition back on the map. So why not the croissant?
Roy’s goal: a croissant that is crisp and flaky on the outside and soft, but not underbaked, on the inside. We are #teamRoy.
