The Best French Pastry You've (Probably) Never Heard of

Le Véritable Kouign-Amann

A real Kouign-Amann has more butter than flour. You read that correctly. Even a croissant pales in comparison. “C’est pour pas avoir trop de gluten,” (It’s so you don’t have too much gluten) quipped Pascal Jaïn, president of the Association du Véritable Kouign-Amann de Douarnenez, in his interview with Le Parisien.

The French, it’s well known, like their butter, but the folks in Brittany, and particularly Douarnenez, are especially fanatic, as evidenced by their emblematic pastry, the Kouign-Amann, which, in the local language of Breton, means butter cake (or technically cake butter, if we’re being exact).

As the legend goes, long ago in Douarnenez, towards closing time, a woman walked into a sold-out bakery desperate for a sweet treat. The baker, resourceful as he was, turned to the three trusty components every Breton baker always has handy.

With his fist, he pounded a brick of butter into a boule of bread dough, obtaining a uniform disk, onto which he spread a layer of sugar thick enough to safely stop a 9mm. He then folded the trifecta into several layers and placed it in a round, deep-dish style pan, designed to contain the spewing butter. This essentially causes the cake to confit in a bath of sugary milk fat, resulting in an ultra caramelized bottom crust and a gushing, pillowy interior.

That all sounds divine, wouldn’t you say? The only trouble is that very few bakers in Paris are insane or sadistic enough to sell something so decadent, which means a real Kouign-Amann is nearly impossible to find. Plenty of bakeries sell what they call “Kouign-Amann,” but they’re knock-offs, fugazi, made with pâte feuilletée (croissant dough) rolled into a spiral with a layer of caramel on the bottom. Like a candy cigarette to a Marlboro red, it just doesn’t compare.

My quest for the real deal would urgently require a trip to Douarnenez, or so I thought until my mother returned from the boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel on the rue des Martyrs with the next best thing.

She had been craving something with apples when a girl slid a hot tray of pastries—with a glossy, almost translucent sheen, which my mother mistook for caramelized apples—into the display case.

She returned with the warm confection, still unsure of what she had purchased. I cracked through the crust with my teeth into an explosion of sweet, buttery ecstasy. Could this be it? My first bite exposed the layers of bread dough, not pâte feuilletée, drowning in butter. “What exactly did she call this?” I asked my mother, who struggled to repeat the unusual name. Confirmation. Pascal Jaïn may not have given his full stamp of approval, but I’m sure he’d agree that many of the fundamentals were respected.

There’s much more than just butter and bread dough calling me to Douarnenez. I’ll make it there in due time. Until then, I’ve got a new pastry to pair with my daydreams.

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Max