The City's best croissants?
...according to a blind-tasting of these from 14 bakeries and cafés by the Food and Wine team at the San Francisco Chronicle, in an article yesterday.
Well, I thought I'd cast my own judgment on it. ::chuckle:: Starting with #1, Juniper, which as it happens is just up the road from me on Polk so, instead of going for my usual cheap (but world-class) bǎnh-mì lunch at Saigon Sandwich in the Tenderloin, I chose to spend that $5.25 at Juniper this morning.
They were precious shekels well spent, as I think the pastry lives up to its ranking by the Chron's FW team. It was both airy and substantial, the crusty flakes with their ASMR hit almost melting away to nothingness on the tongue, and the layered inside of the thing soft and redolent of butter — which, I think, is entirely the point of a croissant. ::chuckle::
Here (below) is an almost obscene closeup of the croissants at Juniper, and I hasten to add that it was taken from behind the glass of the case in which these delights were being held temporarily hostage, my iPhone pressed most indecently onto the surface of the pane. I half-expected one of the bakers behind the counter to glare at me somehow, but they only smiled knowingly.
As you can plainly see, the landscape of a croissant is eloquent; it has rolling hills and sharp escarpments plunging down to riverine streams, the striations on its sides speaking a kind of geological and chemical history known only to the most arcane and rococo of bakers and geophysicists. ;-) And the closer you peer at these surface artifacts, the sooner you realize the fractal aspect of it all, mirroring nature itself.
One could say, at the end of the day, bread is bread and hunger pangs are filled whether by base food elements or ridiculously sublime pastries. And yet, there is artistry here, in these shapely pastral (that a word, even?) forms, that speaks well of the hands that shaped and baked them. In this Polk Street bakery's, the artisan is head baker Amy Chen, and to her I dedicate this absurd (but delicious) post... may all her creations, to the end of time (or at least my span of it), be as tasteful, astounding, and transcendent as this one small but complex croissant I had for lunch today, on the 9th of September, in the 26th year of the 21st century CE.
Now, let's see about the others on that list. It could still be wrong, you know. I mean... the legendary Arsicault at TWELFTH?! Either something was wrong with the Arsicaultian ovens that day or the Chron's F&W team had miscalibrated their sensory devices badly, and passed it off as fine. Pffft.
Next!