Some butter croissants sold in French boulangeries may not be entirely what they appear to be, according to the warning issued by one Paris baker.
A morning trip to a bakery for a still-warm daily baguette – and a super-secret croissant to eat on the way home – is one of the joyous cliches of life in France.
But one Paris baker has warned that some of the traditional buttery pastry treats sold at boulangeries the length and breadth of the country aren’t quite what they seem.
In most good boulangeries, croissants come in two types – croissaints or croissaints au beurre. The second type – butter croissants – are usually around 20 centimes more expensive (and significantly more delicious).
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The difference lies in whether the pastry is laminated with layers of butter, or margarine – supposedly a croissant au beurre should use only pure butter.
But boulanger-pâtissier Matthieu Bijou told Le Parisien that some bakers are turning to a butter alternative made mostly of vegetable oils and water and added yellow colourant – with just a fraction of the butter you’d expect to find in a product sold as a ‘butter croissant’.
The reason? Cost. The price of butter and flour has jumped in recent years. As a result, some bakers have turned to industrial alternatives to traditional raw materials.
The industrial pseudo-butter is a fraction of the price – it costs around €7 per kilogramme, compared to as much as €12.60 for the unadulterated stuff, Bijou said. The product does have butter in it, but it has other stuff too – its basically a mixture of butter and margarine.
If you’ve – even vaguely – wondered how bakers have been able to keep prices relatively stable over recent years, it’s because they have turned to alternatives like this, which contain no more than 25 percent actual butter.
The cheaper alternative is the same price as butter was five to 10 years ago, Bijou said.
The problem, he said, is that it is almost impossible to spot the difference between real butter croissants and ones made with the industrial replacement, without either asking, or paying a premium – a minimum €1.30 per croissant – for ones made using premium ingredients.
A croissant is not the only boulangerie product that has a normal and premium version – there’s also the baguette versus the ‘tradition’.
A baguette de tradition can only contain four ingredients; flour, yeast, salt and water – as specified in the French government’s bread decree of 1993.
The tradition version is usually between 20 and 30 centimes more expensive than a standard baguette, which may contain preservatives or other ingredients in addition to the flour, yeast, salt and water.
Is your daily bread a normal baguette or a ‘tradition’?✎