Crocs have seen many iterations: designer, platformed, heeled. They’ve been bedazzled, but never baked. That is, until now. Content creator @dimda — whose feed is brimming with creative, sculptural breads — shared an image of a Croc-shaped pastry to Instagram last week. The post instantly created a new chapter in Croc history.
When the shoe-shaped pastry, complete with butter charms, first debuted on social media, it was the perfect foodie fodder for countless clever wisecracks. “You ok? you’ve barely touched your crocissant,” @theglennisshow tweeted alongside a picture of the glossy baked clog. My feed was flooded with accounts resharing the stylish pastry.
While many of the jokes about the baked Croc imply it is a croissant, the original caption simply calls the savory shoe a “pastry.” While croissant dough and classic puff pastry dough are similar, there are a few differences. They are both “laminated doughs,” meaning butter and dough are repeatedly folded into layers. Croissant dough requires milk and yeast, puff pastry dough does not. But both doughs are pretty finicky to work with…flaky, if you will. Creating the Croc shape seemed like a daunting challenge, I wasn’t ready to play with a medium that demanded such fool-proof conditions: ideal temperature, the perfect amount of flour, and airtight technique.
I scoured the internet for other bread recipes that seemed shapeable and landed on one for turtle-shaped bread that I figured I could finagle into some semblance of a shoe-shape. The dough came together without any significant hitches, and didn’t take long at all to rise. I was nervous to begin the dough sculpting process, since I had no idea how the original crocissant was formed. I knew I had to create an opening so I worked the dough until I had a general oval shape and used a ball of tin foil to hold up the top of the “shoe.” I played around with the frame for a while, mostly because it felt too rounded-like a generic slipper. Once I was finally satisfied, I baked the bread for 20 minutes.
While my Croc creation was in the oven, I rolled a stick of butter between two sheets of parchment paper until it was about a quarter of an inch thick and left it in the freezer. Once it has hardened I used cookie cutters to make embellishments and I rolled leftover dough into tiny croissant shapes to use as adornment.
Overall, the experiment was executed to satisfactory results (there are very few situations in which I’ll complain about any type of bread). While it took a day to convince myself to finally eat my art project, the Crocissant, or Croc-dinner roll in my case, is the perfect pairing of food and fashion.