Emily In France Exclusive 🇫🇷 5 Off-the-Beaten-Track Viennoiseries

And no... I'm not talking about the crookie

I recently got the opportunity to try the crookie for the BBC. (Yes, I have a terrible job.) This portemanteau of a viennoiserie sees a croissant stuffed with cookie dough and just barely rebaked.

The original crookie comes from 9th arrondissement Boulangerie Louvard (11, rue de Chateaudun) and capitalizes on the very best ingredients. The base is the bakery's already excellent butter croissants, which boast a flaky texture, crisp exterior, and buttery crumb. To transform them into crookies, they're stuffed with freshly made cookie dough generously studded with Mayan Red chocolate from Xoco Gourmet.

The result is extraordinary… albeit a bit too rich for my blood. I love cookies, and I love croissants, but I love them best separate.

I seem to be alone in this, however: Imitations of the original crookie have sprung up all over Paris. This creation, it seems, is the biggest viennoiserie trend to hit Paris since, well, since the croissant.

Yep, the viennoiserie that seems synonymous with France isn't actually that old. The was actually only invented in the 19th century, thanks to the arrival of Viennese baker August Zang in the French capital. His Boulangerie Viennoise, opened in 1837, specialized in all manner of yeast-leavened “fantasy breads” including the crescent-shaped kipferl.

It took Parisian bakers’ application of lamination – a technique borrowed from the Middle East (think baklava) that sees butter encased in dough to create somewhere between 28 and 81 layers – for the flaky, buttery croissant as we know it to come into being, the very first in a category of breakfast buns that would come to be known as viennoiseries – things from Vienna.

These days, some viennoiseries are as omnipresent as the croissant itself. Pain au chocolat sees the dough folded around two batons of dark chocolate. Pain aux raisins is instead swirled around pastry cream and raisins. But others are are a bit more unique, like the “roule ma prune” above, a marvelous creation from Sain Boulangerie (13, rue Alibert) that sees croissant dough wound around a plum filling into a beautiful buttery S.

One of the most famous of these unique creations is perhaps the pistachio-and-chocolate swirl from Du Pain et Des Idées (34, rue Yves Toudic), a bakery so phenomenal it shutters on weekends.

This croissant from Boulangerie Nicolas Flamel (34, rue de Montmorency) gets a bit of a savory streak thanks to a generous coating with za’atar.

And I always love the unique viennoiseries from Ten Belles (10, rue de la Grange aux Belles), where croissant dough is reimagined as a tart base, to be filled with fresh fruit or cream. At Boulangerie Utopie (20, rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud), meanwhile, the same dough is often repurposed for an ever-changing weekend viennoiserie special: These may take the form of rice pudding-filled flowers or praline-stuffed tarts with a croissant dough base.

These unique creations aren’t alone in adding vibrancy to Parisian viennoiserie cases. Some more regional bakes like Norman bostocks or Breton kouign amanns have become just as ubiquitous, as I recently explored in a story for France Today. That said, there are a few truly extraordinary viennoiseries to check out in Paris, many of which have been hiding in plain sight for decades. Here are my favorites.

1. Palmier

This massive viennoiserie (generally around the size of my face) has long been my go-to. Made with buttery layers of crisp puff pastry rolled into a shape resembling a palm leaf, thus the name, the palmier is typically coated generously in sugar before being baked, resulting in a crispy, caramelized, buttery creation.

My preferred palmiers are still a bit soft and pliant in the middle, a characteristic that I’ve yet to find systematically since my once-favorite rue de Buci purveyor closed during my brief hiatus away from the city in 2009. (I maintain that the reason they shuttered was the steep decline in sales due to my sudden departure.) That said, the palmiers at Stohrer (51, rue Montorgueil) and Le Boulanger de la Tour (2, rue Cardinal Lemoine) scratch the itch pretty well.