Walking through Shibuya the other night in a fruitless search for Game Boy games, I saw something that caused me to pause and do a literal double-take: クロワッサンたい焼, or “croissant taiyaki.” Curiosity got the best of me, so I bought one.
Taiyaki, in case you’re not familiar, are a popular Japanese pastry: A fish-shaped piece of pan-fried dough usually filled with adzuki (sweet red bean paste). Normally, the dough is reminiscent of a waffle, slightly sweet but not excessively so, fluffy inside and slightly crisp outside. A croissant, of course, is totally not like this at all, consisting of layers of thin, buttery pastry dough. So, I had to wonder: How would this work?
Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s basically a Japanese cronut. While it bears the shape of a taiyaki, more or less, the consistency of the pastry is more like that of a croissant. The outside is glazed and sprinkled with big chunks of sugar — or, one hopes, salt in the case of the other available flavor, tuna mayo corn.
The taiyaki thing is really more or less a cheat, though. In effect, this is a rectangular croissant that’s been pressed in a grill that imprints the outline of a taiyaki into it. They don’t even bother to trim off the excess dough. For shame.
Tastewise, too, it’s much more like a croissant than a taiyaki: Flaky and buttery.
Though admittedly the adzuki filling pegs this concoction as not necessarily being straight outta Paris.
Although it’s basically just a fancy stamp on a slightly Japanified croissant, it wasn’t too shabby. I could have done without the sugar glaze, though. The outer shell tasted for all the world like those Danish butter cookies that come in the big round blue tin. Do they still make those? I guess they don’t need to. The croissant taiyaki has rendered them obsolete, much like the cronut.
Final verdict: Japan continues to demonstrate its remarkable talent for pushing me toward diabetic shock.
Funny you would say the cronut is obsolete as Japanese bakeries and confectioners have only recently (within the year) embraced the “croissant donut” (cronut is copyrighted) as a thing. Of course it’s always marketed as an exotic American creation, even if the flavors are Japanese. Green tea cronut anyone?
Man, don’t knock it, making things from wildly disparate culinary traditions in Green Tea flavor is one of my favorite things about Japan.
I saw something that caused me to pause and do a literal double-take: クロワッサンたい焼, or “croissant teriyaki.”
i am assuming you meant taiyaki there haha ^
Yes, my stupid computer kept autocorrecting “taiyaki” to “teriyaki.” Guess I missed that one.
Fun fact: “Cronut” is not a word you hear in Toronto. Last year at the CNE (an annual summer fair), cronuts were the cause of a massive food poisoning outbreak. The culprit was, get this, tainted maple syrup.
A few months ago, I had a cronut at a Mister Donut in Tokyo that was much, much better than it had any reason to be.
Everything at Mister Donut is much, much better than it has any right to be.
I dunno, that crust/bread looks pretty good to me. Personally can’t stand the gritty taste of red bean, though.
Jeremy, this is completely and totally random, but…
How long/deep/far have you gone with your study of the Japanese language? It’s just something I’ve been curious about for awhile, given the number of times you’ve mentioned previewing yet-to-be-localized titles or invoked Japanese phrases. I’ve been cramming kanji/vocab/grammar into my head for the past seven months and am still quite limited on the kind of reading material I can handle at present, so I figured you’ve probably been chipping at this quite a bit longer.