Paris Croissants Revisited and Ranked

This post is one of many documenting my week in Paris, a present to myself for graduating pastry school in the fall of 2012. Every moment was spent eating and one post wasn’t enough. It’s now a short novel. Kidding. I hope.

On the flight to Paris, while taking a nap I woke to the smell of butter. My nose said… croissants! I immediately scanned the plane for a coming flight attendant. Sadly, this is what landed in front of me. Never have I seen such a sad, limp piece of pastry. I ate it anyway because well, I was bored and anxious with 2 hours to go till landing. Not a very good reason but I vowed when I got into the city I’d eat enough good ones to make up for this.

Left: Plane croissant, Right: Pierre Hermé croissant

12 croissants in 1 week made up for that one mishap. Thankfully I traveled with a friend so between the two of us we covered 7 different places and had repeats of the ones we liked. I’ll rank them for you here but honestly, it is hard to find a truly bad one a la Mr. Plane Croissant. French butter is just so much fattier and richer, it imparts a flavor unmatchable here in the states.

Thanks to my jet lag I was always up at 6am which meant on more than one occasion I got to a patisserie at opening time. The above is from the last day of the trip. As you can see at 7am, at Gerard Mulot they just started to put things into the cases starting with the most important things of course, baguettes and croissants.

I confess, I may have picked my airbnb apartment based on proximity to my favorite patisseries. A Gerard Mulot croissant was like my morning Starbucks. They had my favorite croissant on my last trip and was part of my Top 3 this time. Gerard Mulot and Pierre Hermé’s shops are somewhat close together so I had many of them and comparing came down to very small details.

Left: Pierre Hermé, Right: Gerard Mulot

Pierre Hermé’s croissants are larger in size though I didn’t find size to be a contributing factor to overall taste. The two criteria really were flakiness and density. Pierre Hermé’s croissants are very flaky and light while Gerard Mulot’s are decently flaky and a bit denser. I liked the slightly more dense texture just because it had more chew. I also thought the flavor was a bit stronger.

Always a sign of good croissants. Lots of flaky, buttery crumbs.

One of the days we had to include a sweet croissant. I was intrigued by Pierre Hermé’s Ispahan Croissant. On the outside, there is the perfect amount of icing for the flakes of dried raspberries. The tartness from the raspberries with the sweet icing was so delicious I ate all the crumbs that remained. Inside was a thin layer of rose and almond pastry cream with bits of lychee. I’ve never been a fan of almond croissants and always gravitated toward chocolate when I wanted something sweet but the Ispahan by far is the best.

Back to the croissants au beurre, Blé Sucré Patisserie was on my list of places to go to try them. It was a particularly cold Paris morning, registering at about 40ºF but I made the trek from the 6th arrondisement to the 12th and over to Square Trousseau where there is a playground and quaint gazebo (Gilmore Girls!). Blé Sucré is one of the shops lining the square so I got a croissant and enjoyed it in the park.

First observation. It was warm! Definite bonus points for that. It was the only one on the trip that fresh. This croissant was like eating a hybrid of Pierre Hermé and Gerard Mulot croissants. It had the flakiness of Pierre Hermé and the density of Gerard Mulot. Which means… we have a winner!

Below is how all the croissants ranked. I focused mainly on the top 3. The ones that fell below that were again, not actually bad but they just didn’t have the same flavor as the ones on top.

 

My Croissant Au Beurre List:

1. Blé Sucré
2. Gerard Mulot
3. Pierre Hermé
4. Sadaharu Aoki
5. Ladurée
6. Cyril Lignac
7. Eric Kayser