Something very important happened last week in the food world. Dominique Ansel Bakery in SoHo created the cronut. What, might you ask, are cronuts? A cronut is a hybrid of a doughnut and a croissant.
While you’re busy wiping the drool off your face, allow us to explain the concept further. This pastry love child is made from fried, layered croissant dough. Between each puffy tier is piped Tahitian vanilla cream. As a finishing touch, the dessert is coated in a rose glaze and sprinkled with rose sugar. The result is a towering tribute to all that is good and pure in life.
In addition to being a creative achievement, the cronut also appears to defy the laws of baking. According to Grub Street NYC, frying croissant dough isn’t easy. Despite being laminated together with butter, the dough’s flaky layers break apart when they hit the hot oil. To make matters worse, the yeast-leavened dough does not brown evenly the way a normal doughnut would. Therefore, Dominique Ansel had to work through ten different variations of the recipe, complete with time and temperature conditions. Finally, he figured out the exact temperature necessary to keep the cronut intact, as well as the best type of oil to fry it in. (Grapeseed, in case you were curious.)
Cronuts are only made in quantities of 200 per day, so get ’em while they’re fresh! Just please: keep the cronut experience classy. Don’t flip off the bakery’s baristas if they happen to run out of cronuts. At worst, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow or attempt to make your own.
Dominique Ansel’s experimentation with dessert hybrids has our brains swirling with other Franken-sugar possibilities. A few of our (patent-pending) combinations include:
1) Tart + Popsicle = Tartsicle – A mini crust with a frozen, pureed filling that is eaten on a three-pronged stick
2) Pudding + Cobbler = Puddler – A gelatinous mold with crunchy granola topping
3) Brownie + Creme Brulee = Cremie – A dense chocolate cake, with caramelized sugar coating and custard swirls throughout
4) Macaroons + Sundae = Roondae – Ice cream, sandwiched between two almond and egg white wafers, with the edges rolled in sprinkles and whipped cream for dipping
Which of these combinations would get your vote?
