The crookie, the TikTok love child of a croissant and a cookie, has landed
The crookie, the latest in a long line of croissant hybrids that includes the Cronut, the cruffin, the croloaf, the cretzel, and the croffle, has touched down in Philly. Here's where to get one.
The Cronut, the original viral pastry, is so 10 years ago.
We’re also over the cruffin (croissant-muffin), the croloaf (croissant dough baked in a bread pan), the cretzel (salted pretzel made with croissant dough), and the croffle (croissant dough pressed in a waffle iron).
Behold the crookie: a croissant stuffed with — and covered in — cookie dough.
Pastry chef Stepháne Louvard is credited with inventing “le crookie” at his Paris shop Boulangerie Louvard in 2022. Baked just for fun, he’d sell a couple of dozen a day to his regulars.
A year later, a food account on TikTok picked up on it and sales began rising. On Feb. 1, influencer Johan Papz sent it viral when he dreamily devoured a crookie in a TikTok video that has amassed more than 3 million views.
Everyone seems to want a piece of the crookie, and bakers worldwide are scurrying to their work benches. Crumbl, the cookie chain, started testing them at some of its 1,000-plus locations. Crookies have turned up in the Philadelphia area, too. Sofi Corner Cafe in Washington Square West, and Elegance Cafe in Wayne and Paoli have offered them as specials.
When Sam Shaw, who owns Sam Shaw’s Treatery at 306 South St., saw them on social media, she thought: “You’ve got to be kidding me. I could do that.”
But it wasn’t so easy to maintain the croissant’s crunch while offering the gooey pleasure of a fresh-from-the-oven cookie, she learned.
Shaw makes cookies from scratch but not croissants — a laborious process involving laminated dough. She sourced her initial test croissants from posh local bakeries before deciding that ones from the industrial ovens at places like BJ’s Wholesale Club can stand up better to the dough injection and additional baking.
She offers three varieties: chocolate chip, double chocolate, or a mix of the two, for $7.50 each. They weigh nearly half a pound. “It’s loaded because everything in Philly is just bigger and better,” Shaw said.
Of crookies and trademarks
New York-based French pastry chef Dominique Ansel set off a buzz in 2013 when he created the Cronut. Ansel applied for and received U.S. trademark 4,788,108 for it, so other bakers must use other names for their croissant-doughnut mashups. (Here’s Ansel’s recipe, if you have three days, the specialized equipment, and the fortitude to make your own.)
With the crookie now in play, two U.S. bakeries are trying to trademark it, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark database.
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Amaury Guichon, a French-born pastry chef in Las Vegas, applied for “Crookie” on March 3, shortly after his own TikTok video of crookie-making went viral. The next day, the Chip Cookie Corp. in Queens, N.Y., applied for “Chip Crookie.”
But what about Louvard, toiling away as the masses gather outside his shop in the 9th arrondissement? Agence France-Presse asked if he would trademark the name of his creation, and his reply was a firm “non.”
“What for?” he said. “To find myself in court with half the planet?”
C’est le buerre, I guess.