The Best Chocolate Croissants

I love chocolate croissants. No other pastry captures the blend of sweet and savory in quite the right way. Done properly the chocolate croissant–‘pain au chocolat’ or ‘chocolatine’ for the French originalists and other anal-retentive culture snobs–is a morning treat that’s just savory enough to satisfy and just sweet enough to delight. Done improperly it collapses into a crusty lump of gluten or explodes into an unmanageable cloud of sugar and chocolate syrup. To butcher Tolstoy, good chocolate croissants are all alike; bad chocolate croissants are all bad in their own way.

I order the chocolate croissant whenever I encounter a new cafe that sells them. I’ve tried the chocolate croissant on each of America’s three coasts and in six countries (and counting). Sadly, most of them are substandard. Mass market goods like those at the grocery store cross the ingredients off a list—bread? check; sugar? check–and call the job done if they can serve up a tray of identical bread loafs with a Hershey’s Kiss lost somewhere in the center. Wild-eyed experimentalists at third wave coffee shops offer up massive hunks of bread decorated enough layers of chocolate and sugar to renovate a gingerbread house. Half of them have the depth of flavor of wonderbread while the other half can’t be safely handled without looking like a dog coming back from a fresh litter box.

There’s a place for such things—the masses deserve bread and the craft must evolve—but in my mind there are specific things that define a quality chocolate croissant.

Start with the crust. It adds necessary texture while also making the croissant a safe handheld treat. Too much crunch turns the experience into an ordeal as the poor pastry lover fights through hardened layers of bread and showers themselves with spray after spray of crumbs. Likewise, a little greasiness is to be expected when handling the crust–the gods demand a price for using that much butter–but a single napkin square should be adequate to wipe it away and keep affairs in order.
Certainly there should be nothing sticky coming off on your hands or mouth. Powdered sugar is a universal sign that somebody is trying to mask substandard bread and I frankly have no idea who started the contemporary trend of applying a layer of hardened chocolate to the exterior of the croissant. These practitioners have no faith in the quality of their product.

The crust gives way immediately to layers of rich laminated bread that hold together for the barest moment when you pull away as if the croissant itself longs to be eaten. A brief explosion of texture accompanies the first bite as the flakes of crust interleaven the airy layers of the croissant and then vanishes into a single bite of rich bread. This should be more solid than cotton candy and less solid than a muffin. Making a croissant properly is a multi-day process involving the curing and repeated folding (‘laminating’) of dough. Uninspiring grocery-store croissants often have the taste and consistency of a slice of white bread and I suspect it’s because it’s not possible to take the requisite time while producing industrial quantities of bread.

Before we discuss the chocolate, we have to turn our attention to time. The unfortunate truth is that there’s a narrow window in which the chocolate croissant exists as I have described it; you have a few hours at most from the time it exits the oven. After that the bread begins to dry and harden, the chocolate turns solid, and the heat required to shake it all loose will collapse the poor thing into a greasy lump. Many of the problems I’ve described–sugar coatings, bad bread, excess crunch–are partly tied to the need to keep croissants on the shelf long enough to sell. I’ve tried eating afternoon croissants on too many occasions and it’s never worth it.

But get to a good bakery early enough–as soon as they open if you can possibly manage it–and you’ll be rewarded with a warm vein of soft chocolate running through the dough. The chocolate folds into each bite and creates a combination of sweet and savory difficult to find anywhere else. Some places skimp on the quality of the chocolate and others seem to have decided the chocolate is symbolic and include barely a dab of the stuff. A quality boulangerie will have rich chocolate running from end to end ensuring that every bite is perfect.

Clearly I have strong feelings about the right way to make chocolate croissants and I’ve actually setup http://www.thebestchocolatecroissants.com so I can share the best (and the worst) chocolate croissants from all around the world.