No more terrible croissants in cafes and bars, please.

I am an enthusiastic and expansive being. I have the soul of a puppet and I walk through life jumping, talking very quickly and gesticulating in a big way. Then I go into a random coffee shop, order a black coffee and a croissant, and it goes away.

A croissant is, according to the RAE, a crescent-shaped puff pastry bun, a honeycombed, airy dough, with ultra-crispy layers on the outside and creamier on the inside, but, in any case, with a texture closer to of a millefeuille than that of a brioche. Even so, the most common thing when ordering a croissant in a cafeteria is to find yourself chewing something similar to plasticine and end up with a wax coating on the palate than even the vault of a Romanesque church filled with lit candles.

This is one of the many misfortunes of the times in which we have lived, the plague of croissants not only of the lowest possible quality, but poorly stored, poorly cooked, and painted with a lick of sweet gelatin or syrup that makes them , accompanying each bite, a small piece of that paper with which it is served on the plate reaches your mouth; If not, the only cooked part of the shapeless dough, the exterior, clings to the cellulose as if it were a hair removal strip, so that one ends up chewing an elastic ball of flour and hydrogenated fat with a glycerin flavor. Dont laugh. Run down to the nearest bar, buy a croissant, separate the horns, if it has any, peel off the outer layer of the central part and play with the dough inside: you will see that you can squeeze it, turn it into a ball and knead it again to model small miniature croissants. Ta-chan!

More information

The puff pastry revolution in Spain

Today I ate the worst croissant of my life. If an ordinary gentleman named Maurice in any French pastry shop were served a monstrosity of the caliber of what I just ate, mid-morning, during working hours, he would order the guillotine to be installed again in the Place de la Bastille and give the starting signal for the second French Revolution. Here, however, this is an everyday slight that we get along with. We embrace it like we accept so many other miseries, not to argue, not to make a fuss, because it's not worth it, because, after all, who has ever tasted a real croissant and knows what it should be like? Have we gone crazy? Are we French? What happened to me today is not an anomaly, but, as Depeche Mode said, it is the kind of pain (

pain

in the original, which means bread or bun in French) to which we are accustomed.

Now I could get involved in a long and detailed explanation in a didactic and constructive spirit about how to make a croissant, but that is not the problem. Not only have we known this for years, the information is there, but bars and cafes buy croissants from frozen pastry distribution chains, from producers who already have well-made high-quality croissants in their catalogues. That's not the problem. The croissant is a dough with large amounts of fat that covers its fibers with an impermeable layer that protects them from the formation of ice crystals. The bun resists freezing wonderfully. Nor does anything happen if instead of buying the most expensive, top-class ones, full of good butter in large quantities, you choose the third-rate ones. What's more, I'm going to sincerely ask you to continue doing it for a while longer, at least until we have clarified what comes next, since it's okay to continue thinking that we live on Fantasia Street in the village of La Gominola. We already have gray hair and we are old.

To begin with, we have a storage problem, either because the croissant defrosts and freezes during transport, or because it waits for a long time in the warehouse before being put in the freezer, or because we are thinking about other things. During this time, the buns defrost slightly, become moist and stick to each other. Furthermore, they are often kept tactlessly. So that they take up less space, they are usually removed from the boxes and stored in bags, which are poorly tied, leaving the croissants exposed to the elements in the freezer. Contrary to what we might think, the freezer is a very dry environment. The ice that forms on the sides and drawers is, precisely, water that has escaped from the inside of the croissants and that comes out to fight against environmental dryness, to try to balance the exterior and interior climates. This phenomenon is what causes the so-called white burn, or freezer burn, which turns frozen slices of bread white and opaque, and steaks brown.

As for cooking, this is usually small and sudden. In our desire to go quickly, we tend to frighten the pastries instead of cooking them, to bake them at too high a temperature, sometimes even without having previously defrosted them, so that they are golden on the outside but raw in the center.

Finally, the shine of the pasta when it comes out of the oven has to be that given by the golden color of a good layer of beaten egg applied with a brush before baking, and not a sticky brush of fly-catching gel.

Bars and cafes, continue buying third-rate croissants thinking that nothing is happening, that no one here notices, and that we customers believe that the margin provided by cheap croissants is where the four dollars essential for the viability of the business come from. But please take them out of the freezer the night before and leave them in the fridge. The next morning, just after raising the blinds, set the oven temperature to 200 degrees, and as soon as the preheating alarm warns that the machinery is ready, lower the thermostat to 160 degrees and bake the pasta, painted with egg. beaten, between 19 and 21 minutes.

With this we turn the country around.

You can follow EL PAÍS Gastro

on

Instagram

and

X.