un peu capoté…

Admittedly, probably my only croissant crawl! This one was filling!

So, Sarah saw a review that someone wrote about croissants in Vancouver. She decided to plan a croissant crawl as a follow-up to The Great Macaron Crawl 2011 and The Great Macaron Crawl, Part II. She made up a terrific list of places to visit. This time, instead of sampling at each location, we brought the croissants back to a single location for comparisons sake.

Melanie and I picked up the first croissants on the way to meeting Sarah. We picked up one Frissant and one almond croissant from Swiss Bakery – the butter croissants were (already!) sold out. We put the Frissant aside for later eating and devoured the almond croissant to give us energy for our… drive.

(Lemon Frissant)

We picked up butter croissants from Beyond Bread, Thomas Haas, Beaucoup Bakery, Terra Breads, Faubourg, Patisserie Bordeaux, Notte’s Bon Ton and Baguette and Co. It was difficult to not buy other things – each and every one of these bakeries were full of amazing looking goodies!

After picking up the croissants, we laid them all out on the table and just stared for a while. It was a little intimidating to look at.

Look at all that flaky goodness!

We decided to divide the croissants into parts, just to see how flaky there were inside.

And based on that, we decided which croissants looked like they had the least and the most promise. We started with what we guessed were not as good, saving the (hopefully) best for last. We actually did pretty well at guessing – some of the ones that didn’t seem as impressive did not appeal. Some were too plain, and had us saying that eating it was a waste of space. Some were too greasy – one even left a funny aftertaste. Some felt more like bread.

Our favourite croissant was the one from Faubourg, followed by Beaucoup bakery and Thomas Haas. We agreed that they tasted the most like what we wanted from a croissant – buttery, flaky and light, with no funny aftertaste.
(Faubourg)

(Beaucoup Bakery)

We saved the Frissant for last, which may have been a mistake. I found the lemon curd inside to be delicious, but the deep fried croissant part was just too greasy. And yes, I know it was deep fried, but I couldn’t finish my bite.

We learned that croissants are incredibly filling. We had sampled nine croissants, leaving behind 2/3 of each, having shared 1/3 of each croissant amongst ourselves. We fully planned on eating more later with Am’s Jams, but just could not stomach it. Eventually, after a few hours of lethargic conversation, we dragged our butts out for some healthy (real) food. We plan on having another crawl sometime, but know now just how important it is to choose the food carefully. I imagine that a Mac ‘n Cheese crawl would end up with us collapsed on some restaurant floor, in food comas!