Grated Croissants

I wanted to be frugal and not waste unsold croissant bread. We started with caramelizing croissant croutons. We cut our croissant loaf into cubes and coated the pieces in a slurry of sugar and heavy cream. We put cream and sugar coated croutons onto a sheet pan and cooked them for about an hour until the croissants and sugar caramelized and formed an almost toffee exterior. We cooled the croutons down and snacked on them. They were delicious. But in their crouton form, they were only a dangerous snack. I looked at the croutons and saw an opportunity to turn them into crumbs for topping our doughnuts. We put them into a food processor and pulverized them into a coarse crumb. We used these on top of our Dough-knots, a new shape of doughnut using our meltaway dough. (Our meltaway dough is laminated in the style of a croissant, so the connection made sense.) The dough-knots with caramelized croissant crumbs were delicious and fun to create, sell, and indulge in.

After looking at the crumbs in action, I had a further idea. I wanted to grate the croissants onto our croissants. We took the croissant crumbs and pureed them with Blond Orelys Chocolate and brown butter. We set the mixture into pint containers and refrigerated it. We baked off our croissants and when they were cool, we used a microplane to grate the croissant mixture onto the croissant. The end result was a buttery, rich, caramelized nest of delicious topping our crispy, flaky, and buttery croissants.