Video: The Pretzel Croissant of City Bakery

Innovation in food can arrive through careful contemplation and repeated experimentation, or, in the case of the pretzel croissant, through sudden curiosity. Eighteen years ago, a German graphic designer came to Maury Rubin, the owner of City Bakery, in search of kitchen space in which to launch a German-style-pretzel business. One day, as Adam Gopnik recounts in this week’s issue, “another baker sprinkled some of the rock salt with which she topped off her pretzels on the standard croissant, crossed its two legs to give it a pretzel shape, and a new thing was born.” Rubin himself was trained in France, and his croissants, which are baked throughout the day in a large kitchen across the street from the bakery itself, are formed using methods that would make the patissiers of yesteryear proud—with laborious butter turns and “a sort of medieval flogging.” Final flourishes add a pretzel-like crunch, and, as with the cronut, two worlds collide.