Croissants

Eastside Road, December 5, 2010—

I MADE GUACAMOLE ma façon today, but let's not rehash all that, I've explained it already three or four times*. And then dinner was a reprise of last night's: that fine pasta with tuna, then a green salad, and the same rosé even as last night.

Nor need we linger over breakfast: it's Sunday; that means a three-minute soft-boiled egg with our toast and caffelattes.

Lunch was also minimal: a cappuccino and a croissant. I wanted a croissant from "The Bakery" to compare to the one I had Monday, while it was still fresh in memory. And I have to say, though I'm loyal to our Downtown Bakery and Creamery (after all, Lindsey was one of the founding partners), last Monday's, from Mix in Ashland, was, well, more to my taste.



Today's, photographed above, was breadier. There are really two basic types of croissant, the bready one and the flaky one, and I prefer the flaky, no matter the mess involved in eating it. There's something about the combination of butter, crispness, and layer on layer of softer pastry inside; it's so, well, Parisian; a flaky croissant is to me what that madeleine was to Proust.

When The Bakery opened all those years ago Kathleen made croissants by hand, and they were fabulous. After a year or so the bakery installed a sheeter, and no wonder: rolling out the dough, folding it in half, turning it a half turn, rolling it out again, repeat, repeat, repeat — that's a lot of work, and they were selling in greater number. (In those early days Lindsey and I used to deliver them all the way over to the Napa Valley, on our way back down to Berkeley after the weekend.)

The machine-made ones aren't as flaky, to my mind. Then too, the weather just now is hardly conducive to making decent flaky pastry. Don't get me wrong, the Downtown croissant is one very fine item; I'd never reject one. I wish I were in shape to eat one every morning, in fact.

*More on guacamole here and here.