Product Review: Trader Joe's Frozen ("take-and-bake") Croissants

A few pieces of background info that may help this post make more sense:

• I lived in Paris for a year between college and grad school and became mildly addicted to pretty much every bread-based product available. 
• I really enjoy lazy weekend mornings with Christopher (and pastries).

Oh, and...

• I am a glass-skeptically-half-full diner when people tell me that some quick and easy frozen food product is as good as the real thing.

Thus, when I found a social media post online stating that a frozen, heat-and-eat croissant was as good as the real thing that takes hours of pastry-making time, I was understandably intrigued - and also afraid to get my hopes up.

Having seen the post - and with a Trader Joe's between work and home - I decided to try these mythical beasts out and see how they were.

They looked fairly promising in the store, so...

Let me explain what happened:

**NOTE: They were $4.49 for a box of 4 - not $3.

The package they come in is small. Like, scarily small. Four croissants in a box that is the size of about one and a half traditional pain au chocolat? That did not seem to bode well. But the price was good - and I knew I could blog about it - so I figured what the heck.

I went ahead and bought a box of each - one chocolate and one almond (see above).

In case you're really wondering about these, here is the basic "recipe" from the back of the box:

With their 9+ hour wait time, Christopher declared them a bit putzy.

As you might expect from the boxes (and the video), these started out pretty small. Small enough to put four of them on the pan that goes into our toaster oven.

Okay… they were supposed to be multiple inches apart. I cheated on that.

I mean… really small:

Yes, I got out one of our kitchen rulers. Basically, I wanted to be able to do a before-and-after comparison. This is obviously the "before."

And flat. Geez. They were flat.

So, I left them on the counter - uncovered - for the night.

(Next time, I might at least put some waxed paper loosely over them. It felt kind of strange to not even do that.)

You're supposed to let them proof for about 9 hours. I think these probably sat out for about 10.5. (I started them before getting ready for bed, and then didn't bake them right away in the morning.)

They rose quite a bit:

I feel I should mention that our house goes down to about 60 degrees at night in the winter - and the counter in the kitchen is near a window that gets even cooler when it's Zero degrees outside.

Following the recipe, I beat up an egg to baste the tops of the croissants before baking.

I apparently didn't shoot that one as a square. Weird.

Action shot!

One thing confused me a little with this. The baking instructions talk about not taking them out of the oven when they are light brown and having to wait until they are dark brown.

Here's the thing: They brown more with the egg wash on them (as well as getting shiny). So they may not get as brown if you don't use the egg. Also, I feel like I'm wasting egg when I have so much left in the bowl after basting.

It's a conundrum.

Either way, though, they did rise even more in the oven, and came out a very respectable size.

You can see that the almond oozed out of the side of one of them a bit - it actually happened to both, you just can't see it because of the ruler.

They were admittedly very pretty when they came out - and the house smelled amazing.

The hardest part was letting them sit on the pan for a bit to set up. (Because puff pastry may "deflate" if you cut into it too soon after it's out of the oven.)

So, how were they?

Well, the one I cut looked like this (for about 5 seconds):

Fair disclosure: One of my favorite foods of all time is an oversized almond croissant that is still warm from the corner patisserie. (Mon dieu! I'm literally salivating while thinking about it!)

Yeah. I admit it. I was incredibly impressed with them. (Even at $4.49 for 4 - not the $3 that I keep saying in the videos.)

Christopher's opinion (which, honestly, was probably less emotionally invested than mine was) was also favorable. He didn't rave about them, but he did say they were a good approximation of a patisserie-born pain au chocolat, and that he'd happily eat them again.

And, for now, I think these may become a new Trader Joe's staple in our freezer.

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Is there a product you've seen that you're too scared to try - and want me to try instead? Or is there something on the market you really want people to know more about? Let me know and I'll see about reviewing it in a future post!