I got interested in really good croissants after having really exceptional ones on a recent cruise on Explora Journeys. They make croissants fresh daily, and given that there were about 750 passengers, they must make many hundreds of them every day. A really good croissant should be light and flakey with many layers of dough, as you can see on this cut photo.
So, I wondered where you can get croissants as good as those without paying for another cruise!
Costco
There is general scuttlebutt on social network sites that you can buy very good croissants at Costco. We found that you can buy a lot of them cheaply there, with a dozen of them for only $5.99, making them about 50 cents apiece.
Unfortunately, they are not flakey at all, and there are no discernable layers. They are just tubular bread. You can, of course, slice them open and make decent sandwiches with them, but they are really just bread, not real croissants.
Stop and Shop
Stop and Shop also sells packages of “croissants” with a half dozen costing $5.79, but despite their being more expensive than Costco is, they are just fairly tasteless tubular bread!
Trader Joe’s
Some Foodies praise the frozen croissants from Trader Joe’s. They offer 8 frozen 5” mini-croissants for $5.79. You bake them at 350˚F for 28 minutes. As you can see, they inflate a great deal during baking.
However, once they are baked and you try to cut one or bite into one, it deflates right away: it is full of air and is quite unlike an actual croissant. If you look at croissant recipes, you will find that during rising, the dough may increase by 50% in size, but does not generally rise much more during baking. The reason these croissants blow up like this is easily discerned from the ingredients. While ordinary croissants contain only, flour, milk, yeast, salt and sugar, these contain a host of additives: Dough conditioner (wheat gluten, wheat four, rapeseed lecithin, malted wheat flour, deactivated yeast, ascorbic acid, enzymes) whole milk powder, carob bean gum, expeller pressed soybean oil, egg yolks, xanthan gum, cultured butter (milk, natural flavor, bacterial culture). And the flour is enriched with vitamins: niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin and folic acid. So, they really aren’t croissants at all.
Trader Joe’s also offers full-sized chocolate croissants that you have to thaw and let rise before you can bake them. This probably takes a couple of hours. Since I was looking for croissants as a companion to my eggs, these wouldn’t do.
Kermit’s Bake Shop
So much for grocers. Now we look to real bakeries. Kermit’s in Redding (Georgetown), CT is a terrific bakery, offering breads, rolls and croissants, including croissant sandwiches. These were top notch! And even after keeping them in a bag overnight, they were really delicious!
The Sono Baking Company
And we can’t conclude with praising the Sono Baking Company, that makes wonderful croissants in their shops in Norwalk and Darien. Since Kermit’s was so good, we didn’t go down there: Kermit’s is closer for us, but you can’t go wrong there either.
So, skip the grocers and look for a local baker.
Or, you can make them yourself. More on this in the next article!