The Plain Croissant Is Still the Best Croissant

I left the bustle of Petitgrain Boulangerie in Santa Monica, Calif., with a plain croissant still hot from the oven, and though I tried to let it cool, I couldn’t.

The outside shattered into so many fine, crisp, delicate layers across a tender, bubbled honeycomb — delicious, with the softest trace of yeast and a bronzed, malty sweetness. As it collapsed between my teeth, it puffed warm, butter-scented air that made it feel like I wasn’t just eating this croissant, but breathing it in.

Fingers shining with fat, jeans covered in crumbs, I started to imagine, just for a second, what it would look like if I rearranged my life and moved to this side of town, in walking distance to this bakery. It felt so good to be reminded that in the competitive and often absurd era of extreme croissants, a plain one could have this effect.

The plain croissant is not, at a glance, thrilling. It doesn’t have the whirling geometry of a Suprême croissant or the show-off shell of some just-gone-viral hybrid, which knows from which angle it wants to be photographed. It is not dramatically constricted, uniformly shaped, caramelized or colored. The plain croissant wasn’t made for the camera.

A crescent-shaped bread arrived with Austrian bakers at the 1889 Paris Exposition, but the croissant stepped into its full power a few decades later, when French bakers started shaping it using a laminated dough.