Introducing the Crois-Kie, a Half-Croissant, Half-Chocolate Chip Cookie Hybrid Pastry
There's definitely an argument to be made that we're living in a time of peak-pastry mashups, but when a hybrid pastry is done right, you don't mind the gimmick. Instead, you wonder why it took so long for someone to come up with this brilliant yet seemingly simple idea. And that's how I felt when I learned about the crois-kie, a new mashup of chocolate chip cookie and plain croissant from Stew Leonard's that's poised to be the next great pastry craze. The crois-kie really as simple as it sounds, even if it is a little crazy. Buttery layers of croissant dough are topped with a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough, and then the whole thing is baked together.
The crois-kie is the pastry hybrid that's so wrong that it's right—and even though you think the blend of textures and flavors isn't going to work, it totally does. Beth Leonard Hollis, vice president of the New York and Connecticut-based group of five family-owned supermarkets, thinks it has to do with the high-quality ingredients: "Being a dairy store, we use excellent butter!" I think it might be the tiny bit of salt that Stew Leonard's adds to their chocolate chip cookie dough, which keeps the whole thing from being too sweet.
No matter what the secret is, this new breakfast pastry hybrid somehow effortlessly combines the dense gooeyness of a homemade chocolate chip cookie with the thin, flaky layers of a croissant without losing the essential cookie-ness or croissant-ness of either.
According to Hollis the idea for the crois-kie came from one of the store's staffers, Rich Dibble. "Rich took two of our best selling items—croissants and chocolate chip cookies—and tried baking them together. The result was delicious, and our customers loved them immediately!"
This isn't the first time Stew Leonard's has crushed it with their version of a hybrid pastry, though. After Dominique Ansel came out with the cronut, that now-infamous mashup of a croissant with a doughnut, Stew Leonard's slayed their attempt at an old-fashioned, doughnut-y version. Their cro-dos are delicious, generally lauded online as some of the best faux-cronuts around (and, for the record, are still available in stores, according to Hollis).
All of the pastries and breads at Stew Leonard's are baked in-house, starting at dark-30, which I'm told is actually around 3 a.m. So if you into one of their stores to pick up a box of crois-kies, you'll not only get to see some animatronic singing milk cartons, you might also be able to get your pasty hybrids fresh out of the oven—and they're definitely best fresh, when the chocolate chip cookie is a little bit melted, and the croissant is soft and warm, like a buttery pillow of laminated dough. (If you do get your hands on a package that's not steaming hot, I recommend throwing your crois-kie into the microwave for about ten seconds before biting into it. Trust.)
