Le crookie lands in Australia: does the cookie-croissant hybrid live up to the hype?
Parisian pastry-chef-purists say they will “never do le crookie,” Adrien Chrunyk warns me.
I ask the French baker if he disagrees – which I assume he does, given he is handing me a crookie he made himself, still warm from the oven, while we talk in his shop Tonton Bread in Surry Hills.
“No, I was like that.”
Well! There goes the faint glimmer of hope that maybe the cookie-croissant hybrid will live up to its viral hype.
Le crookie joins a long line of croissant hybrids – this time the delicate pastry of a croissant is cut in half, stuffed, and baked again with American-style chocolate chip cookie dough.
Invented by Stéphane Louvard from his family-run bakery in Paris, the pastry has exploded in popularity on TikTok and Instagram and bakeries across the world are replicating it for queues of customers.
Big supermarkets in France have also started selling crookies in plastic boxes. “It is going viral everywhere,” Chrunyk says.
He has been baking and selling crookies for a month now – “we saw it was a banger in Paris … we decided to do the same” – and is seeing a hoard of new business for it.
“[Customers] come especially to take pictures and videos, and they don’t buy anything else, they just ask ‘do you have le crookie?’,” Chrunyk says.
I’m visiting his bakery to do just that – here on a mission to put le crookie to the test.
With disgusted curiosity, I inspect the two before me. Spilling out the top and sides of browned croissant pastry is the gooey, chocolatey mess of a steaming cookie.
Chrunyk himself would not have thought to combine the two desserts. “For technical reasons, I did not think it was compatible,” he says, explaining that croissant and cookie dough require a very different baking process.
“But actually, it works.”
I take the crookies back to the office. They look dense. They smell sickly sweet. My colleagues observe with apprehension.
Breaking apart the pastry with my fingers is a messy task – pastry crumbles and breaks, chunky bits of melting chocolate coat my fingers. It feels good.
A wave of trepidation hits just before I take a bite.
Back at the bakery, Chrunyk told me of the labour that goes into a simple croissant.
“It is a very delicate product, a very technical product,” he said. “You have to take care of temperature of the butter, you take so much time for the product to be nice, and then you bake it.”
He looked down at the crookies: “Then you squash it with a cookie and put it in the oven?”
But the pastry in my mouth is a warm, sweet explosion of chocolate and pastry and dough, and, against my best judgment, I realise I really like this – nay, I prefer it to a regular chocolate croissant.
Have I gotten lost in a creation that only thrives because of a capitalist culture of online mass consumption?
Maybe. But I cannot deny the satisfaction that comes with downing two comfort foods in one cloying bite.
And if the man who baked this crookie is French (which he has confirmed), and the bakery that invented the dessert is Parisian (which the Guardian has confirmed), and I inherited my Lebanese ancestors’ taste buds that were forced to adapt under decades of French colonial occupation (which is not confirmed but adds a dramatic build-up to my point nonetheless), then surely the pastry capital of the world cannot shun us for enjoying it?
Nobody had faith in le crookie – the miscreant, the nonconformist, the other. But after some encouragement, several colleagues take a bite and are (generally) enthralled.
Yes, a number of the newsroom’s big bosses refuse to touch the avant garde combination. But from those who do, the overwhelming response is of pleasant surprise.
Le crookie is “an elevated chocolate croissant,” one opines.
“You can’t have more than a quarter, but for that quarter I think it is a marriage made in heaven,” says another.
A few even say they “would eat again”.
Our resident culinary expert, Yvonne Lam, takes her time assessing each element of the dessert, pausing on the croissant pastry with concern – what would otherwise be a light and buttery pastry was crumbly and flakey, almost like it was toasted, she says.
“It’s good if you like cookies but hate croissants.”
That being said, she agrees it tastes exactly as the name says it should – a choc chip cookie sandwiched by a croissant.
“I don’t think it was necessary for them” – the cookie and croissant – “to meet, but I don’t think my life is worse for them meeting.”
