Food, Home & Lifestyle

Case Study: The Cronut®

Lesson time 05:03 min

Dominique takes you inside his New York bakery to share the origin story of the dessert that launched a thousand imitations – the croissant-meets-donut mashup Chef coined the Cronut® – and how you can use emotion to create your own memorable pastries.

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Topics include: Case Study: The Cronut®

Dominique Ansel

Teaches French Pastry Fundamentals

James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel teaches his essential techniques for making delicious pastries and desserts in his first-ever online class.

Preview

The idea for the Cronut was very simple. I wanted to create something new. Putting two pastries together, the croissant and the donut. So the Cronut is laminated dough that has some fermentation. So it has those beautiful flaky layers and is filled with, usually a cream and a ganache. I took initially a few months to develop the technique and the recipes. - To make a Cronut, it's actually pretty long. It takes about three days. The first day, I will mix the dough and ferment the dough. The next day we'll incorporate the butter and do all the folds, all the layering. The third day we'll cut the Cronut, ferment it, fry it, fill it with two different fillings-- usually a cream and a jam-- and then we'll roll it in sugar. We finish it with a glaze on top. And then it's ready to be served. When I first put the Cronut on the menu, I only had 20-25. And I still remember we were just a few of us at the bakery. It was just myself and four employees. I had two people in the kitchen and two people helping me serving the guests. A friend and a blogger came by. And he snapped a photo of it. He asked me what it was and what I was working on. He put it on his blog and the article he posted went viral. He called me the same afternoon letting me know that he had over 140,000 link to the article and increase of traffic of 300%. And at the time, I was really tired. I was working long hours. And I was like, you know what, I'm happy for you. Going back to work, I have a lot to do. And he was like, no, no, you don't understand. This is a big hit. It's going to be big. And you should make some more for tomorrow. So for the next day, I made 35. And of course, we sold out within a few minutes. By the third day we had over 150 people waiting outside. People were trying to sell cookies and drinks. People were scalping a Cronut. So they were buying it and reselling it on the street. I was really taken by surprise. And I was literally overwhelmed. I would work 20 hours a day. Everyone was asking for it. People were lining up as early as 2 o'clock in the morning, waiting outside the shop to get the Cronut. It was pure madness. The team was just freaking out. So I managed to keep everyone on board by doing speeches to my team before we open the doors. Because everyone was scared of letting so many people in. A lot of people asked me what made the Cronut so successful. What happened? And a lot of people asked me if I had a marketing strategy, or if I had budgeted for this, a PR campaign. And of course, I had none of this. I only had four employees at the time. It's still very difficult to explain what made the Cronut so successful. To me, I think it's a mix of a lot of different things. I think it's nostalgia. I think there's creativity. And I think it opened so many doors for other people to be creative and to start thinking of their own ideas. Nowadays, we make as many as we can. We make a few hundred. But the most important for me is t...

About the Instructor

Celebrated for his innovative twists on classic desserts, Cronut® creator and James Beard Award-winner Dominique Ansel has been called the “world’s best pastry chef.” In his MasterClass, Dominique teaches his essential techniques for perfect pastries. Learn baking and more with his precise methods, add classic recipes to your repertoire, and explore texture and flavor inspirations to delight friends and family with your own decadent desserts.

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Dominique Ansel

James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel teaches his essential techniques for making delicious pastries and desserts in his first-ever online class.

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