Finding The Best Pan au Chocolat in Greenpoint

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

Charlotte Patisserie

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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