Frissant fever: Vancouver’s version of the cronut leads to long bakery line-ups

If you’ve been following the foodie news this month, you’ve been introduced to the newest pastry craze causing dedicated epicures to line up outside New York’s Dominique Ansel Bakery at dawn like it was registration day at a Park Avenue preschool.

The cause of this organized chaos is something called the cronut, an inelegant portmanteau to describe something that probably caresses your tastebuds with flaky, buttery sublimity.

A cronut is pretty much what it sounds like: the test tube baby of a croissant and a doughnut. Each delicate piece of sugary heaven starts out with fried specialty croissant dough that gets tossed in sugar, pumped full of high quality Tahitian vanilla ganache and topped off with a “rose glaze and crystallized rose petals.”

Basically it’s the sort of creation that you’d risk both waistline and gluten intolerance to sample once in your life.

So it’s no wonder that copycat cronuts have started cropping up all over the world.

Also see: This doughnut-croissant hybrid may be the pastry world's best invention yet

Our very own contribution to the cause comes out of British Columbia. At Swiss Bakery in East Vancouver, CBC reports that the “frissant,” their Canadian version of the cronut, has resulted in similar lineups on Third Avenue.

Operations manager Annette Siu tells the Huffington Post that the bakery tossed out 14 different recipes before they got it right on the fifteenth try.

"You have to completely re-work the dough," she says. "Otherwise you'd have butter bleeding out into the oil. This is a completely different product."

Their persistence seems to be paying off. The frissant has been selling out since the middle of the month and shows no sign of let-up.

"It was mid-June that it just spiked," Siu says. "We just suddenly had lineups out the door before we opened and we were just caught off guard and there was just such huge demand."

Part of that spike can be attributed to local bloggers who were invited to sample the goods.

Also see: How to make delicious cronuts at home

The rest can be attributed to the fact that their creation sounds divine. The donut-shaped frissant comes in two flavours, chocolate and vanilla, and its texture mimics that of a flaky croissant with all the deep-fried deliciousness of a donut.

Though all credit goes to Dominique Ansel for the original idea, Siu stresses that the bakery worked hard to make something in their own style.

"We have never tried the original cronut," Siu tells the Huffington Post. "We don't know how it really tastes. But we've been making donuts and croissants since we opened in 1993, so we thought we could figure it out."

Because it’s a complicated pastry to create, the bakery only manages to churn out 200 each morning. Due to this limited number, each customer can only carry home a maximum of four frissants per person. Which is probably for the best, as the original cronut only has a shelf-life of six hours. And a metric tonne of calories.

Does this sound like something you would line up for an hour to sample or does your gastrointestinal tract have different ideas? Sound off below.