Cronut, the lovechild a of donut and a croissant, has been an ongoing sensation in New York for half a year. Recently, this unique pastry arrived to Budapest thanks to Briós.The cronuts – which are shipped from Vienna every day – balance on the verge of "tasty" and "way too sweet", so even a single bite can result in a severe addiction.>
Cronut? What the..Despite the hype surrouding the cronut, it is nothing else but a donut-shaped croissant. The mixture of the layered croissant-dough and the donut's funny shape was Dominique Ansel's idea. After two months and ten unsuccessful recipes, he finally managed to create a perfect cronut.
The rest is pastry history. Since the making of the cronut takes three days, Ansel bakes only 300 cronuts per day. It's a limited type of pastry - each customer can buy a maximum of two pieces from the daily batch. This limited accessibility might be the very reason for the cronut's popularity. Each day, there are kilometer-long lines at the bakery, and they run out of the tasty hybrids in couple of minutes. This phenomenon has been going on in New York since the summer. There's even a story about someone regularly sleeping in front of the bakery instead of hurrying to the front of the line in the morning. He buys cronuts for others and earns 300 dollars per week by doing so. Good job, buddy! We’re all proud of you.The Austrian contactIt didn't take long for the world to start copying the cronut. There are replicas in the Far East, the Netherlands, and London, but nowhere did the cronut get as trendy as in New York.
The owner of Briós had to travel all the way to Wien to be able to sell cronuts himself, since nowhere in Hungary did he find a baker or confectioner who could approach the brilliance of Ansel's pastries.
Thus, we get a batch of cronuts from Wien every morning so that we won't miss out on this tasty world-wide phenomenon.Willy Wonka on the squareThe cronut is bigger than an average doughnut and its layers are visible from the outside, too. The dough is so tender that any kind of topping can only enhance the heavenly taste. Briós offers plain cronuts (590 Ft) and other variants with chocolate, vanilla, hazelnut caramel, and lemony maple syrup toppings (650 Ft).Although the chocolate one can be recommended to hardcore fans only: not only the top is covered with chocolate that resembles Willy Wonka's delicious creations, it even has a thick cream filling.
In Briós, you can ask for various foods as a side for the cronut, and you can spice up the plain version with a variety of homemade jams (150 Ft): the strawberry and lemon jam are high recommended.
What do I call you?For now, we'll call cronut by its original name, but since Dominique Ansel trademarked the term "cronut", there's a possibility that we’ll have to give the pastry a different name. Staff at cink.hu (a Hungarian, blog-like website delivering all sorts of news) brainstormed the names "knoafánk" ("croughnut") and "hipster doughnut"; Briós came up with the title "rongyos fánk" ("ragged roughnut"), since the croissant's Hungarian name is "rongyos kifli" ("ragged crescent"). But no matter if ragged or not, we think it's time to prepare our sleeping bags.
