Name: Anne&Max Haarlem
Address: Grote Markt 5, Haarlem, 2011 RC, NL
Telephone: 023 303 1018
Price range: €€
Rating: 2.9

Netherlands

Haarlem

Anne&Max Haarlem

Butter folded into a yeasted dough in dozens of thin layers, shaped into a crescent or a straight log and baked until the outside shatters and the inside pulls apart in a honeycomb: the croissant is the test piece of every French bakery. Its ancestor is the Viennese kipferl, a plain crescent roll that arrived in Paris with Austrian bakers in the late 1830s; the version made from puff-style laminated dough is a French development from the second half of the nineteenth century, and the first recipes for it appear around 1900. In France a croissant au beurre is by law made with butter and is traditionally straight, while the croissant ordinaire, made with margarine, is curved so customers can tell them apart at the counter. Outside France that rule is unknown and most croissants are curved whatever is inside them.

The dough is a lean, lightly sweetened bread dough with a modest amount of yeast, rested cold, then wrapped around a slab of cold butter and rolled and folded three times, each fold tripling the layers, with a rest in the fridge between folds so the butter stays solid and the gluten relaxes. Twenty-seven butter layers is the usual target. The sheet is cut into long triangles, rolled from the base without stretching too hard, shaped, and proved slowly at a temperature below the melting point of butter, which is the step most kitchens rush. Egg wash, then a hot oven, around 200°C, for fifteen to twenty minutes: the water in the butter turns to steam and forces the layers apart, and the sugar and milk in the dough brown the outside. A croissant is finished when it is deep gold and feels light for its size.

Judge a croissant by cutting or tearing it across the middle. The crumb should be an open web of thin, translucent layers with large irregular holes, not a dense bready sponge; the outside should flake into shards on the plate. It should smell of butter and taste of it, with a faint tang from the slow fermentation. Mark down a greasy surface or a buttery film on the fingers, a soft and bendy exterior, a compact centre, and any hint of margarine, which leaves a waxy coating on the palate. Weight is a clue: a good one is light. Flat, pale croissants were under-proved or baked too cool; collapsed ones leaked butter during proving. Day-old croissants reheated in an oven are acceptable in a café, but they lose their shatter, and a croissant served still slightly warm from the morning bake is the standard to measure against.

Croissant

I wanted get a dessert next to my flat white.
I went for this pistachio croissant.

I don’t know why the taste was not fresh because it was mid day but it didn’t please me.

Bread was not fresh. Pistachio cream was nice. Pistachio pieces are nice idea but still they were not crunchy as well.

Anne&Max Haarlem

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