‘Crookie’ is a dough faux pas despite being dessert du jour
WHEN Stéphane Louvard decided one day to cross a croissant with a chocolate chip cookie “for fun” he had no idea it would turn into a global gastronomic phenomenon.
Now, his Parisian boulangerie is besieged by pastry lovers in search of “le crookie”, after his creation was taken up by a string of influencers on Tiktok
“It’s totally insane,” he told The Telegraph as his team prepared a huge batch of the high-calorie pastries in kitchens under his boulangerie Maison Louvard in Paris’s eastern 9th arrondissement.
“I was happy with my croissants that day back in 2022 and saw my young team making cookies and thought, ‘Let’s have some fun.’”
At first, he sold a few dozen a day. Interest picked up after a video posted by an Instagram account called The Ultimate Guide, which specialises in Paris’s restaurants, driving sales up to 150-200 per day.
But the real catalyst was a post in January by Johan Papz, a French Tiktoker who filmed himself tucking into one and exclaimed, “C’est une dinguerie” (“It’s crazy good”).
Three million views later, the bakery was taken by storm. The bemused 51-year-old, who took on two extra workers to meet demand, said: “It took a day or two, then the queues started. From 150, it went up to 400, 500 then 1,600 and often over 2,000 a day.”
Mr Louvard denied it was sacrilegious to adulterate the classic croissant beurre, officially dubbed a viennoiserie as its origins are Viennese.
Beyond the “pain au chocolat”, this is not the first time the croissant has been morphed into a portmanteau pastry, he said. In 2013, New Yorkers couldn’t get enough of Dominique Ansel’s cronut – half-croissant, half-doughnut.
But Mr Louvard said the quality of the croissant remains key. “It only works because the croissant is a proper crusty homemade one,” he insisted. It cut open and cookie dough inserted, before being rebaked until the dough becomes crusty and the inside melts. Compared with its weighty rival, the croissant beurre offers a light and flakey feel thanks to lamination, which sees a yeasted dough thrice “turned” or folded around sheets of butter, creating 27 layers of butter encased in 28 layers of dough.
Call me old-fashioned, but this correspondent can safely say I prefer the good old croissant beurre. The queues suggest others disagree. But that’s the way the crookie crumbles.