It’s no secret that I love Du Pain et des Idées – and I’m not the only one. Owner Christophe Vasseur makes a delicious bread he calls the Pain des Amis – friendship bread – in a wood-fired oven that he sells in his absolutely gorgeous 19th century bakery just off the Canal Saint-Martin.
Vasseur is also a master of the escargot (and I don’t mean an actual snail). His chocolate-pistachio swirl has made the rounds on Instagram more than once (and his praline one is nothing to turn up your nose at either).
This swirl pastry, like the croissant and the pain au chocolat (which Vasseur calls, as those in the south do, a chocolatine) is part of a third category of baked good: neither bread nor pastry, but viennoiserie.
The most famous viennoiserie is undoubtedly the croissant – and it’s actually thanks to this flaky breakfast treat that this subset of baked goods got its name. Viennoiserie evokes the city of Vienna, where the ancestor to the croissant, the kipferl, was invented. In the 19th century, the Parisians modified the Viennese pastry by applying a technique known as lamination, creating the flaky, buttery croissant we know and love today.
In French, the professional who makes bread is called a boulanger; the one who makes pastry, a pâtissier. Traditionally, a maker of viennoiseries is called a tourier – so named for the tours or turns required to laminate a dough – but in reality, peddlers of viennoiseries alone are rare (if they exist at all), and if you ask Vasseur, few bakers and pastry chefs are true masters of this technique. These days, in most bakeries you enter in France, you’ll find an amalgam of bread, viennoiserie, and pastry on offer… some of which might not even be made on-site. (In fact, somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of croissants sold in Paris bakeries are not even made by the baker.)
In direct opposition to this trend, Vasseur produces no pastry at all: only bread and viennoiseries. And both are excellent.
Unlike most of Instagram, my favorite viennoiserie is actually not the pistachio swirl, but rather the pastry cream-filled sacristain.
And while these cheese-stuffed rolls are absolutely delicious…
… it’s hard to beat his massive, smoky, crispy Pain des Amis.
Du Pain et Des Idées – 34 Rue Yves Toudic, 75010Â