And the best croissants in Portland are...
Jul. 11—THE TASK — Name the best croissant in Portland. (Don't let anyone tell you newspaper reporting isn't a demanding, high-stress job.)
THE LINEUP: Bread & Friends, Norimoto Bakery, Standard Baking Co., Zu Bakery and — if good intentions count — Belleville.
THE JUDGES: Six members of the Portland Rendezvous Meetup group, which gathers twice a month "to speak French and enjoy the camaraderie of fellow Francophiles."
THE DEETS: The judges met this month on the Eastern Prom for a quick game of boules as a warmup for the day's highly strenuous eat-multiple-croissants-from-Portland's-best-bakeries assignment. In fairness, most of the judges were French and had just come from voting online in the bitterly contested French election. A pick-me-up was in order.
THE QUEUE: On July 3, the scheduled taste-off day, it took over 2 1/2 hours, from 8:20 a.m. to 11 a.m., to round up 12 croissants and three croissant cousin pastries for this assignment, a distance of some 4 miles total. At 9 a.m., the line at Zu Bakery (which recently won a James Beard Award for the nation's most Outstanding Bakery) was 63 people — and precisely one hour — long; a crowd of locals across the street looked on, bemused.
The line was somewhat shorter, though by no means short, at Standard and Norimoto; Norimoto owner Atsuko Fujimoto was also a Beard award winner this year, for Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker. At Bread & Friends, the service was excellent and quick.
Would our judges, croissant lovers all, wait in line for an hour to eat a croissant? To a man (and woman), no. Parisians have, however, been waiting in long lines this summer for le crookie, a mashup of a chocolate chip cookie and a croissant that has become a viral sensation. To say that our judges do not approve would be understatement.
APPRAISAL APPROACH
The judges easily spelled out their assessment criteria. The qualities they look for in an exceptional croissant include good lamination, flakiness and a very slightly sweet taste.
"A good first impression. Color," croissant judge Jennifer Wolcott offered. "If it's too brown, it's overcooked. If it's pallid, it's undercooked. So you want just the right golden look."
"The aroma. The aroma is important," she added a few minutes later. "You want to smell the butter in the dough, and the yeast when you open it up, when you take your first bite."
Butter is key, everybody nodded in agreement. Two types of croissants are sold in France, they explained: "Croissants ordinaire," which are made with margarine or oil and often found at the supermarket, and "croissant au beurre," which are made with butter, typically sold in artisan bakeries — and cost more. Satisfactory croissants, the judges agreed, require butter, specifically excellent (typically cultured or Appellation d'origine controlle-labeled) butter.
N.B. Even butter croissants in France cost considerably less than croissants in Portland. Those in our sampling sell for $4 to $5 apiece. In France, the judges said, a croissant costs about $1.
"In France, the government subsidizes good food. They don't subsidize snack (and processed) food," croissant judge, Portland resident and "long-time croissant eater" Andrew Rosenstein said. "We do the opposite.
"The idea of good food is less special (in France)," he continued. "Here we feel, 'Oh, it's special. It should cost 10 times as much. In France, it's a feeling of good food is like good air or good water. It exists as a democratic ideal for all the people."
A TIME AND A PLACE
Have you traveled in Italy and been marked for an ignorant American when you make the mistake of ordering a cappuccino after 11 a.m.? Now imagine you are in France. Here's an insider tip: Croissants are for breakfast (often daily breakfast). Unless you want to be fingered as an uncultured American rube, DO NOT ORDER THEM LATER IN THE DAY. An exception is made for schoolchildren, for whom it is perfectly permissible to enjoy a chocolate croissant as an after-school snack.
If you are really after some French cred, order a plain croissant (no almond, no ham and cheese) and eat it as follows: "No butter. No jam. No honey. You dip it in your coffee," said Portland resident and judge Gladys Baudelot (hometown: Etretat, Normandy).
In an email after the tasting, croissant judge Pierre Guillaume of Harpswell (hometown: Tain l'Hermitage) also had strong opinions on the matter: "If you want to eat ham and cheese, get a baguette!"
Some free additional advice for American travelers. Do not dip your croissant in another beverage, say, green tea. "That'd be awkward," said Sophie Guillaume, a retired French teacher and Pierre's wife (origin: Alen?on, Normandy). "That's a post-modern suggestion," Rosenstein said to laughter all around.
If you've already figured out that this story is timed to Bastille Day, France's independence day on Sunday,there is, in actual cold, hard, break-a-reporter's-heart fact, no croissant-eating tradition associated with the holiday, the judges said. Or really any food traditions whatsoever for Bastille Day.
Hang on! Croissant judge Bernard Cabrera (hometown: Orleans), who now lives in Portland and serves on the board of Alliance Francaise du Maine, named a possible connection. Admittedly, a bit of a stretch. Merci beaucoup, Bernard.
The storming of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789, sparked the French Revolution, an event the holiday commemorates. Then French Queen Marie Antoinette is said to have told the starving peasants who were demanding bread, "Let them eat cake." (Historians don't believe she really said this.) Still, the point is, Cabrera said, since way back, "The love of food and the necessity of food is important in France."
"The French are so proud of their history," Rosenstein said, referring to an even older historic event: the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Austrians in 1683. By the 19th century, the crescent-shaped pastry invented to celebrate that victory had made its way to France, where it eventually morphed into the croissant. This history is also disputed. "Every morning," Rosenstein said of the French, "they eat a historical document."
IN WHICH THE WRITER MAKES EXCUSES
Before you continue, if you are looking for a scientifically controlled taste test of which bakery has the best croissants in Portland, stop reading now. Even a rank beginner scientist would throw these results out as quickly as your average French person would sneer at a slice of processed cheese.
To begin with, I failed to carefully control the order that tasters tried the three plus one sort of/kind of (more on that in a moment) croissants, so that palate fatigue could have interfered with their judgment. Next, I failed to insist they drink sips of water between bites or use separate plates for each pastry in order to prevent cross-croissant contamination.
I did not provide coffee, either, which may not have affected the validity of the taste test, but it certainly lost me the respect of the French nation, where the pairing of croissant with coffee is as sacrosanct as our own pairing of peanut butter with jelly. Also, the sole qualification I'd sought in my lineup of six judges was that they were French (or in two cases, French-adjacent). The taste test was, at least, blind.
The fact that the basic criteria for judges was "Are you French? OK, you're in," by the way, read as common sense to those who made the cut. "We grow up ,and it's not a novelty. It's something you eat everyday," said Cabrera, who is married to Wolcott, an American. "It's like baseball for America."
And please don't discount Wolcott because of her nationality. She is a food writer, a wonderful cook, a "nearly fluent" French speaker and owner of a boutique travel company that leads food (and more) tours to France. Also, as she wrote on her tasting sheet, she's "always loved croissants."
Cabrera, meanwhile, listed one of his own qualifications this way: "One key priority to choose our home in Portland was to be 5 minutes walk at the most from a bakery."
There were more failures: I didn't think to check whether Norimoto would have croissants on the day I conducted the taste test. The bakery did not. As Fujimoto explained in an email, she doesn't make croissants in July or August unless temperatures stay in the low 70s or below for several consecutive days. Several days because croissant-making is a three-day process, which is why most French people sensibly leave the job to the pros.
In high heat or humidity, the dough gets over-proofed and the croissants themselves fail to caramelize nicely in the oven, Fujimoto continued. "We have AC but it is no use when the oven is running." In a panic, I inserted a kouign amann pastry from Norimoto into the croissant lineup instead. My justification? Um, it's another French pastry? Also, Fujimoto uses the same dough to make croissants. (Because the kouign amann is baked with sugar, the dough is more forgiving, she said.)
Then there was The Belleville Quandary. Belleville, a wonderful bakery on Munjoy Hill, specializes in laminated dough and describes itself on its website as "Mainer meets Frenchie, who marry and together dream of opening a bakery. They move to Paris, learn to bake, and eventually settle in Mainer's hometown to raise a family and open a bakery." (The Mainer is Amy Fuller; the "Frenchie" is baker Chris Deutsch, whose mother is Parisian.) It'd be unthinkable to choose the Best Croissant in Portland without tasting a croissant from Belleville.
Unfortunately, Belleville's Friday through Monday opening schedule did not jibe with my deadline. Fortunately, many of the judges were already familiar with Belleville croissants, that is to say they'd eaten plenty of them. So while technically speaking, Belleville croissants were missing, two judges ranked them first in our tasting, anyway. A third judge ranked them second.
"The best lamination! Crispy outside and soft buttery inside," Baudelot wrote on her tasting notes of the regretfully omitted Belleville entry. "Belleville croissant can put some bakeries in Paris or France to shame!'
In the same unorthodox territory, Norimoto's kouign amann ranked well among its croissant cousins. Baudelot not only guessed the bakery, but ranked it No. 2. "Excellent!" she wrote. "Love the butter + sugar combination + pecan."
Even two avowed kouign haters approved. "Not as fatty as a real K-A," Pierre Guillaume wrote on his tasting sheet. "And maybe better as far as I am concerned."
Had I remembered to track down the rumor that the AC Hotel on Fore Street imports the croissants it serves from France, our lineup would have had an additional local (?) croissant. Too late, I spoke with AC assistant general manager Peter Bennoch, who confirmed it. Twice a week, depending on the size of the guest roster, the hotel imports croissant dough from France. Every morning, it bakes off croissants made with that dough. Given Portland's many outstanding bakeries, among them Standard, a five-minute walk from AC Hotel, why go to the trouble of refrigerated packing, jet planes, customs, international deliveries and such?
"This is a Spanish-inspired hotel," Bennoch said. "We try to keep to the brand with our European roots." (AC Hotels were founded by a Spaniard.) Croissants are French, I helpfully pointed out. "Same neighborhood," he replied with good humor.
Finally, let me cut any self-styled croissant experts reading this story off at the pass: Bakeries all over Maine make croissants, no doubt excellent croissants. On Maine Public's "Maine Calling" radio show the day before our croissant tasting, a listener said that Farms Bakery in Caribou makes the best croissants north of Boston. If we have omitted your favorite, please accept my sincere apologies and without delay have a sample croissant delivered to Press Herald, attention Peggy G., Food Editor, 295 Gannett Drive, South Portland, preferably with coffee, so that I can devour it — I mean, of course, meticulously judge its quality.
THE TASTING NOTES/RESULTS
Please bear in mind that some tasters ranked Belleville and the Norimoto kouign amann, and some did not. Also, a couple of tasters gave half marks.
No. 1: Zu Bakery, which got three votes for first place. Among the comments: "Authentic taste." "Very crunchy on the outside (nice). melting in your mouth — enjoyable." "Best one! Crunchy. Succulent. Wonderful butter flavor."
No. 2: Standard Baking, with one vote for first place and three votes for second place. The comments included: "A little dry, but very good. Looks really good too." "Crisp outside. Aroma of butter. Layered. Holes not too big so dough proofed just enough."
No. 3: Bread & Friends, with one vote for second place and 3 1/2 votes for third place. "Not enough butter. Lacks flavor." "Lacks fat. Nothing to write home about." "A bit too soft. Not layered enough." "Subtle sweet butter flavor." When the judges heard this result, though, they were surprised and distressed. "Their bread is great!" Baudelot said. "We are very lucky here in Portland with bakeries that make excellent croissants."
C'est vrai.
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