Finding The Best Pan au Chocolat in Greenpoint
Our quest to find the best chocolate croissant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
We are fortunate to have many incredible bakeries in our home neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Many of these have a specialty, but one common treat found among all of them is the esteemed Pan au Chocolat.
Hey Brian, don't you think it's pretentious to call it pan au chocholat? Just say Chocolate Croissant like a normal person.
It is pretentious. It's also persnickety and provincial, and I won't apologize. These pastries don't have a crescent shape like a Croissant. They're not required to exclusively use butter as per Parisian law. They're not Croissants and I won't call them that.
Anyroad.
Pan au Chocolat is an underrated masterpiece of baking, no matter how highly rated it is. A good specimen has all the balanced texture of a delicate pastry, enhanced with a measured dose of slightly melted dark chocolate. It's flakey, buttery, sweet, and salty. All at once.
When presented with this embarrassment of riches, a wise person would express gratitude and enjoy the benefits. Fortunately, I am not wise, so I conducted a taste test in an attempt to maximize my pastry pleasures.
The Contestants
We select the Pan au Chocolat from 5 highly regarded Greenpoint Bakeries (in alphabetical order):
Evaluation Criteria
We evaluated our pastries on a scale from 1-5 points along these attributes:
Appearance
When you close your eyes and imagine a pan au chocolat, what do you see? The contestant should match that. We're looking at color, shape, visible folds, visible chocolate, and size.
Flavor
It's about balance. Salty and sweet. Bready but not yeasty. Buttery but not dairy.
Chocolat-iness
The chocolate should surprise without dominating the conversation. A hint of bitterness from the richness of the cocoa. Never ever milk chocolate.
∞ Flavor and Chocolat-iness were combined during scoring.
Texture
Perhaps the best and most important attribute of a good pan au chocolat, and what separates it from other pastries, is the balance of flake and chew. The outer layers need to crackle as you bite into them, giving way to the soft chewy folds within. Freshness is key here. Pan au chocolate can not sit.
We chose not to consider price as we believe it would introduce too much bias into the judging. There was a slight inverse correlation between price and score. The prices ranged from $4.50 to $7.50 with most costing about $5.50.
Tasting Notes
All of these pastries were fantastic.
Charlotte's pastry volume was a standard deviation larger than the others. I think this swayed some judges in the appearance category.
The Radio Bakery entry chose a unique approach, infusing their dough with chocolate. Paradoxically this did not heighten the chocolat-iness of the flavor. I think this also made it difficult to compare the appearance objectively.
Nick & Sons slightly burnt the bottom of their pastry lowering their flavor score. On another day they might have ranked better, but how you show up is how you show up.
Pan Pan and Bakeri were extremely similar in most regards. The differences probably came down to personal preference.
The category winners
Best Appearance
- Charlotte Patisserie
- Bakeri
- Radio Bakery
- Pan Pan
- Nick & Sons
Best Flavor
- Pan Pan
- Charlotte Patisserie
- Bakeri
- Nick & Sons
- Radio Bakery
Best Texture
- Charlotte Patisserie
- Pan Pan
- Bakeri
- Nick & Sons
- Radio Bakery
Our Judge’s Picks
Betty: Charlotte Patisserie
Melody: Pan Pan
Brian: Bakeri
Conclusion
There was not a bad item here. These scores are a relative comparison between this cohort. Please do not interpret lower scores as a condemnation in any way because you will have a great experience eating any of these pan au chocolat. We did.
Unfortunately the reality of competition is there must be a winner 💪
Best Overall
The highly anticipated overall winner across all judges and measured criteria for the best Pan au Chocolat in Greenpoint is...
- Charlotte Patisserie
- Pan Pan
- Bakeri
- Nick & Sons
- Radio Bakery
Congratulations to Charlotte Patisserie, but I think the real winner today is everyone who ate 5 pan au chocolat.
All the data
Let me know if you have another pan au chocolat we should try!
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