Wild croissants from Sydney and Melbourne: moons, discs and more

As bakers strive to set themselves apart in a competitive market, bakery’s new wave of bakery pastry cabinets look more like galactic objects than traditional French pastries. Croissants are on display. Pastel icing, two-tone striped croissants, rectangular Portuguese tarts, and chunky crescent dripping wheels are some of the shapes found in Sydney and Melbourne, where each city bakes. Entering the post-cronut phase of confectionery.

The “eating with your eyes” feature on Instagram and TikTok definitely helps experiment. But bakeries like his Yeongjin Park at Tenacious Croissant in Darlinghurst, Sydney, also bring their own cultural perspective and influence to the French craft known as viennoiserie.

Park learned pastry and bread making in South Korea before moving to Australia and teaching himself to make croissants. Today, he makes pastries stuffed with ingredients like black garlic, charred corn, octopus and bonito flakes, drawing inspiration from his upbringing, travels, art and architecture.

“Fortunately, no one taught me how to make a traditional croissant, so I think I can think more openly and come up with different ideas,” says Park.

His bestseller is the rectangular Pastel de Nata (Portuguese tart), which is less sweet, adds miso caramel, and increases in size.

In the south of Melbourne, Drom Bakery debuted just over a month ago, inspired by the bakery’s name (meaning dream in Swedish) and the fact that bakers wake up while the moon is still in the sky. Three tempting pastries have emerged.

A line snakes out the door for an elongated chocolate and hazelnut crescent and two half-moon pastries sporting raspberry or caramel icing drips. Demand was so great that he planned to produce 2,500 pastries each week, but he had to adjust production to 10,000.

Frenchwoman Agathe Kerr admits that Earl Gray and coffee croissants from Melbourne’s Agathe Patisserie are a little too bold in the country where she trained. But her move to Australia exposed her to flavors she had never tasted before, such as pandan and matcha, igniting a creative chapter in her viennoiserie.

It is named after the Boulangerie Viennoise, which was opened in Paris by Austrian entrepreneurs in the late 1830s to sell Austria’s favorite crescent-shaped rolls. Includes nutritious breads such as escargots, croissants and brioche, as well as puff pastry.

Cronuts and cruffins were added to the viennoiserie canon in the mid-2000s as mashups of croissant dough and donuts and muffins. The current generation is even more heretical.

Drom Bakery had molds made specifically for half-circle and crescent-shaped croissants. Molds are also essential at his Tuga Pastries in Sydney, a predominantly Portuguese bakery.

Its tugatel – a portmanteau of tuga and sfogliatelle, a wavy Italian pastry – is about as high as your index finger, filled with chocolate ganache, mascarpone, and more and topped with fruit and marshmallows.

Making them is a long process that requires a steady hand to cut the many strips of fabric to create grooves in the top, as reflected in the $14 price tag.

“Tugatel can be finicky, but we love it.

Manufacturing laminated fabric products is already time consuming and physically demanding. There are several stages of rolling and folding to embed the blocks of butter into the dough, followed by long cooling to stop the butter from seeping.

According to Carr, making different colored doughs adds another layer of complexity to any croissant, whether it’s a raspberry-striped croissant or a coffee variant.

“The tricky part is when you add something like that, it affects the yeast. It doesn’t always rise the same way, so we have to keep an eye on it.”

What’s the reward for extra time in the kitchen?

“If you’re a pastry chef, it’s fun to challenge yourself and find new flavors.

Agathe Carr

Tuga and Drom are currently developing new flavors and maverick shapes.

“There are too many ideas to come out all at once. It’s a very slow process,” says Ferreira.

With the number of bakeries continuing to grow in each city, it’s also possible that newcomers will feel the need to carve out their own niche.

Classic viennoiserie shapes and how to pronounce them

viennoiserie – vien-wah-zaree

A group of baked confectionery made by layering dough and how to make it.

croissant – kwah-son

An original Viennoiserie item inspired by the crescent-shaped bread found in various parts of Europe.

Pan au chocolat – pan-o-shoko-la

The classic shape is a rectangular pastry rolled around two chocolate batons. A chocolate croissant is a croissant with chocolate covered.

Pan au raisins – pan-o-ray-san

Unlike pain au chocolat, this is a raisin-dotted, glazed spiral pastry.

Kouign-amann – quin-ya-man

Derived from the Breton words for cake (kouign) and butter (amann), another key ingredient in this round pastry is sugar, which is sprinkled on top of the butter and on the outside of the tin to create a caramelized layer.

Torsade – tohr-sad

Named after the French word for twist, these are often sprinkled with chocolate and other sweet ingredients, but Australian bakers have used the shape to update their Vegemite cheese rolls.

Brioche – Brioche

Roll the “r” when pronouncing it. It’s not as crispy and buttery as the laminated pastry above.