It is 3:30 a.m., the witching hour, the dead of night when magic is at its strongest. While the rest of Palm Springs sleeps, the baking and prep rooms behind the storefront at Peninsula Bakery are buzzing with activity. While Christian Larotonda deftly shapes dough into baguettes, Christophe Meyer swiftly paints a pallet of raw croissants with an egg wash. His wife, Hélène, moves around both men like a tailback dodging tackles, balancing a tray of pastries headed for display cabinets.
Meyer finishes painting the last of the croissants. “We will let that soak in and dry, and then do a third wash before they go in the oven,” he explains. Three applications of egg wash is part of the magic that goes into a classic French croissant. It’s the egg wash that turns into a cascade of feather-light flakes when you take a first bite of the pastry. Only an authentically made croissant produces a little rain of crumbs.
Meyer arrives for work a little past midnight. One of the first things he does is prepare dough. He knows from experience how much dough he needs to make 150 croissants and 50 danishes for the next day. But, he still has other factors to consider as the dough proofs for a full 24 hours: the temperature outside and humidity. The colder it is outside the bakery’s walls, the longer the dough will need to proof. The long proofing time is vital to the quality of his products, according to Meyer. Many bakeries push the development of dough with more yeast, but Meyer’s goal is the opposite. He doesn’t want yeasty dough. “The longer the proofing time, the better the flavor,” he says. “The goal is the flavor.”
Perhaps one of the most shocking things about le croissant is that its origins are not French. Some sources suggest that an Austrian pastry called kipferl, which dates to the 13th century, might have been somewhat akin to rugelach (a pastry often filled with nuts, spices, or dried fruit). Though the early kipferl was reportedly crescent-shaped, it allegedly became Vienna’s hero pastry in 1683, when combined Austrian and Polish armies defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna. The crescent-shaped pastry resembled the crescent motif on Ottoman flags; so, it became symbolic of their victory.
For the next century and a half, kipferl ruled Austrian coffeehouses and bakeries. That was so until 1838, when an Austrian artillery officer named August Zang opened the Boulangerie Viennoise in Paris. It became immensely popular – particularly his Vienna loaf and kipferl. Zang also introduced the first Austrian steam ovens to France. These industrial machines became essential in producing the crisp crust and soft center of French baguettes.
Interestingly, Zang returned to Austria after press censorship was lifted and founded a newspaper. Later, he developed an interest in mining. After the magnate died, his contributions to French baking were not mentioned in his obituary.
Nonetheless, the recipe for the crescent pastry (aka, croissant) was refined and became a staple of French gastronomy by 1850. Variations of the pastry can be found in many countries, including Turkey, Portugal, Argentina, Poland, and Italy.
In no case should a gross crescent of dough found at a certain, ubiquitous drive-through coffee shop be considered a croissant.
As night slowly creeps into morning, Meyer hits tray after tray with a third and final egg wash. Unfortunately, I’d arrived too late to witness the lamination of dough and butter. This multilayering creates the characteristic chambers and thin layers within a croissant. Meyer takes a moment to show me the table where he spreads a seven-foot-long sheet of croissant dough. He also presents the special German-made tool that lets him cut the dough precisely, in preparation for the next step – forming the sectioned dough into its distinctive crescent shape.
With a glance at the clock, Meyer is off to the next task. It’s astounding to watch Hélène, Larotonda, and Meyer as they ceaselessly complete multiple tasks through the night. There are no breaks, no breathers. A couple of times during the night, Hélène made demitasse cups of espresso, but they drank them on the run. “We constantly have our eyes on the clock,” she says. “To do this correctly, it is very hard labor.”
When they opened Peninsula in October 2014, they were determined to create a bakery that would be as respected in Paris as it is in Palm Springs. They were also determined to do everything by hand and to source their non-GMO, no-preservative flour from a small mill in northern France. They import butter from France, plus many other ingredients not readily available in the United States like apricot glaze for their pastries. A hundred small things make a difference, including the egg wash. Many bakeries simply spray a solution over pastries and breads. At Peninsula, eggs are cracked, an egg wash is mixed to a froth, and Meyer hand-paints it over every croissant, three times. Thus, the necessity for a relentless pace.
Meyer, a native Parisian, graduated as a pastry chef when he was young. But, he “then went on to do many different things in his life,” Hélène says. One of his passions is classic American cars. “When I was growing up in Paris, I would see these classic cars left behind after the military left,” Meyer recalls. A friend of his was an automotive journalist; together, they came to the United States on road trips. They went to car shows in California, Utah, and Nevada. Meyer now owns four classic cars; he does all of the work on them himself. He owns a 1963 tan Thunderbird convertible (that is usually parked in front of the bakery), a 1955 Buick, a 1962 Chrysler convertible, and a 1929 Ford hot rod.
Hélène, a sales manager from northern France, went to Paris to establish a career and met Meyer there. He lost both of his parents approximately 14 years ago and told his wife, “I want to leave France. We can open a bakery and restart to be pastry chefs.” They traveled the entire West Coast to find the best place to start their business. “We went to Palm Springs for a vacation in 2013 and fell in love because it is a small town with diversity and soul,” Hélène recalls. “And we live under the sun, which is nice. Also, people have money to respond to this type of business.”
The sky in the east was just starting to turn purple when Meyer judged that the croissants had risen sufficiently. The temperature of the double oven at the rear of the bakery was perfect at 356 degrees. So, Meyer slid in the racks of 150 croissants. The massive, French-made Pavailler oven can heat to multiple temperatures in various bays. When the team begins baking, the oven is set at a lower temperature for soft dough. The heat gradually increases throughout the morning until it reaches its hottest temperature. Then, it is turned over to Larotonda for his baguettes and other breads.
Larotonda is from Nancy, France. He moved his family to Palm Springs a couple of years ago to join the Meyers. His demi-baguettes are little masterpieces – the half-spice mix, the olives, and the gruyère. All you need is a little French butter (which is sold by the stick at Peninsula Bakery), a quarter-pound of mortadella, and an Opinel picnic knife, and lunch is served.
Meanwhile, Hélene picked up the pace in the front of the store. She filled display cases with cakes and pastries, little lemon tarts with smiley faces, and the ever-popular (at least, in my house) chocolate tongue. As the display cases filled, a certain Pavlovian response took place – the mouth watered and the stomach growled.
And then, voila! Larotonda wheeled in the tall bakery cart filled with rack after rack of croissants and pain au chocolat. Even after spending part of the night in the bakery suffused with the most heavenly smells on Earth, le croissant was almost too much to bear. It was difficult to decide whether to eat a croissant or have the smell infused into blanket form and roll up in it in bed.
Hélène still had much to do before she opened the store at 8:30 a.m. (There is almost always a small line before then, and a longer line January through March.) So, she filled a couple of paper bags with croissants for her guests and bid them a fond adieu.
Thirty minutes later, still-warm croissants filled a platter in the center of the breakfast table. Milk was poured and a cappuccino was made. A croissant was broken in half, and flakes showered the table. A deep whiff was rewarded with butter made air. A satisfying bite of one end of the crescent delivered both crunch and the soft chewiness of the interior. It’s an ongoing mystery how a single bite of a perfect croissant can be both deeply rich and light at the same time. It’s a mystery that might only be solved by years and years of research.
