Le Sacrilège!

For years, no chef dared try to improve the croissant. Now, though, a new generation of bakers is reinventing the most iconic of French patisserie.

- Ligaya Mishan

THE CROISSANTS OF Baker Doe — a delivery-only pastry service in San Francisco, run by a husband and wife who decline to reveal their identities — appear like a new species startled in the wild. One is striped blue, with a coif of cotton candy in hydrangea hues and a lode of chile-enflamed orange curd waiting to be unleashed; another, ringed in deep purple, flaunts a lavender shard of ube (purple yam) like a lone, useless wing. They are originals, yet they don’t exist in isolation: Others of their kin — that is, pastries in thrillingly deviant forms with classical French lineage but non-canonical ingredients (often drawn from Asian cuisines), as likely to be savory as sweet — can be spotted at Sugarbloom Bakery in Los Angeles, confettied in nori; at Bake Code in Toronto, blackened by charcoal under a rosy crust of mentaiko (cod roe); and at Supermoon Bakehouse in New York, piped with rum crème pâtissière and pineapple jelly in a mirage of a piña colada.

Is this blasphemy or natural evolution? It’s not the first time pastries have undergone mutations in recent history. Nearly five years ago, the French-trained pastry chef Dominique Ansel trademarked the cronut, that cannily named croissant-doughnut hybrid sold from his storefront in SoHo, New York. Hoards lined up before dawn for limited-batch runs that vanished within the hour, to be resold on the black market by scalpers at a 1,900-per cent markup (as much as $100 each). The cronut was fetishised, then scorned for being fetishised, then imperfectly and ubiquitously reproduced. Dunkin’ Donuts sold millions (of a version that a corporate spokesman insisted had been in development for decades). Within a year, the oracular science-fiction writer William Gibson had published a novel forecasting a future in which cronuts were churned out by 3-D printers.