Where else but California would two foreign foods liberals love consecrate into a heathen matrimony? Well, eat up, snowflakes: A bakery in California has concocted the California croissant, which is a sushi croissant and requires no further description because it’s exactly what you think it is. Still, to be more specific: It’s a croissant with a free-floating tube baked inside of smoked salmon, seaweed, ginger, and wasabi, and is sold for $5. The pastry comes with a packet of soy sauce, which is a sentence The A.V. Club is printing for the first time.
It’s the creation of Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, the San Francisco-based bakery whose tagline declares: “Kale sucks. Putting carbs back in their rightful place,” and whose jobs posting page includes the line, “If you’re as serious about baking as you are about getting baked, then get at us.” The bakery (with locations in Los Angeles and Seoul, South Korea) is known for popularizing the Cruffin, a croissant-muffin mash-up.
As with these hybrid foods, the name is meant to draw attention to a food that probably isn’t so outrageous. Bread and salmon have been dance partners ever since bagels and lox.
The A.V. Club decided to interview the braintrust behind this sushi croissant. Here’s the entirety of the transcript:
The A.V. Club: Why?
Rene Montelongo of Mr. Holmes Bakehouse: In all honesty, we get bored easily. Think about your absolute favorite album. Now throw it on repeat for three months. You see what we’re getting at here? No matter how perfect track 12 is, chances are you’re sick of it after a few months. Pastries are no different. The foundation for our menu development is simple: we want to make something we love enough to throw on repeat for 90 days. But we also want to push the limits of pastries. To use a prior example, regardless of how amazing a macaron could be, it’s just never going to make it onto our menu. We want our pastry case to express the inventiveness of our teams. It’s also important to us to view the pastry case as a whole. Is it diverse? Is it colorful or just brown? Since our company focuses heavily on croissant dough, it’s our goal to push the limits of what we we’ll be able to do with our laminated doughs during the quarter’s R&D.
Every quarter, we go through dozens of ideas and move forward with ones that we’re most enthusiastic about. in this case, it was a croissant stuffed with smoked salmon, baked seaweed, pickled ginger, and wasabi, topped with furikake. Does it follow any of the current hype-trains in pastry right now? No, it’s fucking weird, insanely delicious, and it sticks a thumb in the face of pastry tradition.
The A.V. Club: Okay.