Lori McCue
2013 brought us the doissant (don’t call it a cronut), and 2017 saw the birth of the bagel doughnut. Now there’s a new hybrid pastry in town: the cretzel inside the pastry case at The Cup We All Race 4 at The Line hotel.
It sure looks like a pretzel, one of those big soft ones from the mall, but it’s twisted from strips of buttery, laminated croissant dough. The exterior is plenty flaky (our office taste test coated my desk in a healthy dusting of flaky crumbs), but each bite has a surprisingly tender core, much like the interior of a typical croissants in a bigger, crescent shape. Like their mass market inspiration, they come in savory or sweet options: sprinkled with local salt and sesame seeds, or dusted in cinnamon sugar.
The pastry is the brainchild of Alicia Wang, pastry chef at A Rake’s Progress, also at The Line. Since she started in the kitchen two years ago, she’s experimented with the scraps of croissant dough left over after the pastries are shaped, usually whipping them up into snacks for the staff. “You can roll it up, you can make flowers, or twisted buns,” she says. “I’ve braided it … I’ve made it into a croissant monkey bread, too.”
Croissants are sort of Wang’s holy grail in the food world. “Before I took this job, I knew I wanted to know how to make croissants, that was my main goal,” she says. “Croissants have always been my favorite pastry.” She put in time at Kinship and Metier in D.C. before signing on to Rake’s Progress as a pastry cook.
The Line, meanwhile, has been involved with a fight with the D.C. Council this year over a tax break it claims it is owed.
View this post on Instagram
The cretzel experiment was inspired by Wang’s sister, who spent time in Germany, “and they pretzel almost anything there,” she says. The laugencroissant, a croissant with a crispy, pretzel-y exterior, is pretty popular in the country, in fact.
Like the laugencroissant, Wang’s cretzel starts with croissant lamination, which is the Great British Bake-Off-level word for flour dough that’s painstakingly layered with sheets of butter (that’s how croissants get their millions of flaky layers). As in her croissants, Wang uses half spelt flour (for a soft interior), and half whole wheat flour (for a crispy exterior). She twists strips of this dough into your typical pretzel shape, then they go into the freezer.
The twisting isn’t just to mimic a familiar shape, Wang says. “Twisting it actually lets you see the lamination even more, because otherwise you might not see it,” in a regular croissant, in which the edges are tucked into the crescent shape.
Each morning, the cretzels are defrosted for proofing, and that’s when they’re dabbed with a sodium hydroxide solution—that’s what gives all pretzels, not just cretzels, their salty, shiny exterior. Then they go into the oven to bake.
Sodium hydroxide, or lye, is pretty toxic, by the way, but it’s commonly used in pretzel-making and curing of food. Bakers in Wang’s kitchen use gloves when handling it, and it took some trial and error to find the right way to get it on the pretzels. “They tend to break down our pastry brushes pretty quickly,” Wang says. These days, they dab the solution on gently.
The cretzels have been on offer at The Cup We All Race 4 since June, alongside their more typically-shaped croissant counterparts and other breakfast pastries and cookies. At $6 each, they’re a little pricier than their peers in the pastry case, which Wang says is because the cafe considers the cretzel a “specialty pastry,” a.k.a., not an everyday item.
In fact, the prices of all the breakfast items tend to be more expensive than those at other bakeries, Wang says, because of the local ingredients used. The restaurant rotates suppliers from the Mid Atlantic: Right now, for example, the butter and flour in her cretzels come from Natural By Nature dairy and Small Valley Milling, respectively, both in Pennsylvania.
Wang is getting a reputation for offbeat combos at The Line—her other big menu addition this summer is a tomato sorbet dessert. It’s inspired by a snack her grandmother used to make for her: tomatoes from the garden, chopped up and sprinkled with sugar. So far, she says, it hasn’t exactly been a hit: “I guess maybe it’s not appealing on the menu,” Wang says. “But every time people order that, they love it.”
Her next experiment is adding flavors to the cretzel: She’s playing around with a cheese and herb flavor, and with adding mustard to another savory iteration.
