The Croissant Survey
An investigation into the best quality supermarket croissant, which has since gotten out of control (Frankenstein style).
How it started
Let me take you back to August 2017, London. I had started commuting into work from Surrey every day and the takeaway coffee became a necessary evil at 08:00. As the days got colder, I needed more motivation to get across London Bridge into the City. The thought of a warm croissant was enough.
Just starting out I wasn’t made of money. I knew Pret croissants were good, but you paid a price for them. Supermarket bakery croissants did the job. I started by going to whichever chain was least busy at that time. Sometimes Sainsbury’s, sometimes Tesco, if absolutely necessary then Co-op. At some point my aunt, who I commuted with, took me into M&S and bought me a croissant there. All the wandering around was annoying and I wanted to be able to go to one tried and true branch and get the goods. A prerequisite was the stop being on the way to work. I started with Sainsbury’s on Fenchurch Street. Waitrose on London Bridge came later in the game, when I was feeling boujee (and obviously duty-bound to carry out a proper test).
I started collating information on the varying quality across the supermarkets. What started to unfold got rapidly out of hand when paired with obsessive, A-type tendencies, a lust to find the ultimate supermarket croissant, and a hunger for THE TRUTH. The Croissant Survey was born.
The Survey
The Survey was and is arbitrary, imperfect, changeable and all of the below are subject to being relegated. In order to carry out a controlled test, the sampled croissant is always plain (although there are shoot off surveys for pains au chocolat and almond croissants).
The (plain croissant) Survey is as follows:
1
Waitrose
2
Marks & Spencer
3
Sainsbury’s
4
Tesco
5
Aldi UK
6
Lidl GB
7
Co-op Food
Factors: crunchiness/flakiness of the outside (including the croissant’s “ears”), squishiness of the inside (moist but not too moist), overall experience.
Waitrose is a winner as their selling point is that they warm/cook the croissants periodically throughout the day (I have a strong internal source for this, as well as having asked the poor, confused staff member at London Bridge Waitrose). The biggest downside of the supermarket croissants is that, to the best of my knowledge, they are imported into the UK frozen before being cooked in the “internal bakery”. Needless to say, the quality downgrades throughout the day.
Once I had gotten into the Croissant Survey it sort of took hold of me. It escalated as it broadened, what was irritating was so did its flaws. I couldn’t keep up – in order to achieve fair results for each ranking I would need to try a wider cross-section of each individual supermarket chain. Sainsbury’s on Fenchurch Street could not speak for the Sainsbury’s brand as a whole! How could one Survey be so comprehensive and specific when the variables were forever changing?
The addition of Pret to the Survey brought up a host of other issues, predominantly because Pret a Manger isn’t a supermarket chain. Would the Survey have to be divided into different sections?
1. Supermarkets
2. Cafés
That didn’t work either. The competitors to Pret would be the likes of EAT. Those are both sandwich shop/franchise chains. Chains can’t be fairly compared against independent cafés. And what about bakeries? Where would PAUL and Gail’s fall?
1. Supermarkets
2. Franchise Cafés
3. Independent Cafés
4. Franchise Bakeries
5. Independent Bakeries
I would need to stick “6. Other” on the end of that list, just for good measure. The problem was, I wanted it all. And when people started to hear about what I was doing it was no longer about the supermarket croissant. It became a task of finding the best croissant in London.
I was just one person. I would have to quit my day job! That’s ridiculous, but the thought really crossed my mind. I had to accept that the Survey could never be perfect.
One saving grace of the Croissant Survey is its flexibility. It has, and will continue to be taken outside of London, wherever there is a peddler of croissants and a croissant surveyor willing to chomp through a few pastries. Side note, anyone willing to be a foreign correspondent should be aware that the first establishment on the hitlist is what has been dubbed as the “perfect croissant” at La Sirène, Bormes-les-Mimosas, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (page 78 of the Waitrose magazine August 2021 edition).
If I had to rank a top croissant, plain, chocolate (to be honest any pastry I trust them so much) I would have to say La Maison, Berlin.
The History
In an area so pastry rich as Europe, there are of multiple voices clamouring for ownership of the croissant. After allegedly being introduced by Austrian-born Marie Antoinette in 1770, croissants became mainstream in France from the mid-19th century, with the croissant becoming a French national product in 1920. The debate about how it got to that point includes looking into how it was made, where and by who.
What sounds in equal parts absurd and plausible is that its birth was thanks to Viennese bakers working underground in 1683, who heard and then alerted the army to the fact Ottoman troops were trying to dig their way into a besieged Vienna. Post Ottoman retreat, the bakers marked the victory by making bread in the shape of a crescent moon (symbol of the Ottoman Empire).
The Science
A classic French croissant has 55 layers (27 layers of rolled out, butter). The layers are created through rolling and folding the dough and butter together. There are a variety of different technical folds, and the process is called ‘laminating’. The top should be crispy and flakey. The inside should be gooey but not unstable. There should be a honeycombing of the layers. The honeycoming is created during baking as the butter melts, creating rising steam that cooks the croissant from the inside.
Top French pastry chef Laurent Duchêne says butter is the key to a good croissant.
FAQs and some answers
1. Why are my croissants chewy?
If the croissant has air pockets that are very small and the texture is ‘bready’ (chewy and tough), that means the croissant dough was overhydrated. This can happen when there's excess moisture in the air or too much water was added to the dough in the beginning.
2. What should the inside of a croissant look like?
A perfect croissant has a very crispy outside. The inside has a good smell and taste of butter.
A bad croissant is very soft, like a brioche, and doesn’t smell of butter. It is contradictorily dry and not creamy inside.
It shouldn’t be too oily inside. Soft honeycombing is key.
3. Am I eating this right?
If it is crumbling all over you like there is no tomorrow, getting in your hair, on the train seat, on your trousers and shoes, if you are finding bits of croissant on you hours after: you are eating it right.