There’s nothing like spending a month carefully researching the first proper guide to Portland’s best croissants, hitting publish, and then having to report, less than a week later, that the bakery in the No. 1 spot would be closing at the end of the year.

That’s what happened in November, when Trifecta, the clear winner of our big croissant hunt, a search that spanned bakeries across the metro area, announced their imminent closure six days later. At least Trifecta, which had been largely ignored by Portland in its six-year run, got to go out on a high note, with their handsome pastry case selling out within an hour or two of opening even after owner Ken Forkish’s hard-working team increased production.

But now that Trifecta has officially closed, and as its replacement, Bar King, prepares to open with a bakery of its own, it’s about time for a quick update to our croissant guide, acknowledging the major hole at the top.

As a reminder, in my search, I looked for golden brown pastries with an attractive egg wash and the pronounced shoulders of a 1980s power suit. Lift was important — croissants should be about three to four inches tall, depending on the size. I’m a fan of a tidily tucked “nose” and “ears” that display the croissant’s well-spaced layers, though that’s more of an aesthetic concern than anything else. In the hand, a croissant should be surprisingly light. Squeezed, it should give off flakes. Inside, it should be neither greasy nor too dense. On the tongue, subtle notes of sugar and yeast should compete with the dominant flavor: butter.

For this roundup, I visited 24 bakeries, some recommended by friends, others by readers. I tried a butter croissant at each. After that initial survey, I revisited each contender at least once, then, with the help of five hungry colleagues, picked up fresh croissants from the top six for a head-to-head blind taste test. Along the way, I didn’t finish each croissant, but assuming about a tablespoonful of butter per pastry, I ate at least two sticks of butter over the two weeks of heavy eating for the project, perhaps more.

We didn’t redo the research here, but instead bumped each bakery up one spot, making room for a laminated pastry specialist that made headlines in 2019 at No. 5.

PORTLAND’S BEST CROISSANTS

The distinctive diamond-shaped pastry from Northeast Portland newcomer Twisted Croissant.

No. 5: TWISTED CROISSANT

The breakthrough moment for modern laminated pastry creations came in 2013, when New York-based baker Dominique Ansel first piped Tahitian vanilla cream into deep-fried rounds of croissant dough. The resulting product, the Cronut™, duly trademarked by Ansel, led to lines 100-deep outside his bakery.

Just a few months later, on the other side of the world, Melbourne pastry chef Kate Reid made her own mad creation: Laminated dough baked in muffin pans and filled with a pantry’s worth of creams and jams. The Cruffin, as it was called, was later brought to the United States by a San Francisco bakery, Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, which later trademarked the term.

That’s where Portland’s Twisted Croissant comes in. Kurt Goddard, a corporate pastry chef for the Salty’s restaurant chain, had watched the Cronut craze sweep across America with a passing interest. But it was the Cruffin — and a New York Times headline floating it as the best croissant in the world — that caught Goddard’s eye. After starting out making a “really horrible version” with raspberry and vanilla that his colleagues nonetheless “went crazy for,” he decided to dive in full time.

The highlight at the brick-and-mortar cafe remains the croissant muffin (for legal reasons, this is a no-portmanteau zone). The traditional butter croissants, which have a signature diamond shape when seen from above, are good, though in our original ranking, after trying out a couple of batches that fell flat, they ended up tied for sixth with Baker & Spice. But with Trifecta’s closure, it’s time to give Twisted its due.

Bake time: Before opening each day.

Price: $3.75

Other laminates: Croissant doughnuts, croissant muffins, two-tone croissant and other creations.

7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; 2129 N.E. Broadway St.; twistedcroissant.com

Jinju Patisserie located at 4063 N. Williams Ave., Portland, Ore., Oct. 25, 2019. Mark Graves

No. 4: JINJU

How many Portland bakeries can boast the joint resumes of chocolatier Jin Caldwell and pastry chef Kyurim Lee, both former pastry chefs at top Las Vegas hotels? Not many. Yet despite their combined decades of high-level experience, croissants were rarely a professional focus. Still, Lee was passionate about baking and had taken a class with international pastry consultant Johan Martin. And with construction delays at their shop’s North Portland building, they had time on their hands. So they filled their tiny apartment kitchen with ingredients and tools.

“We didn’t even have a sheeter,” Lee said of those early experiments. “I would roll (the dough) with two different rolling pins. It was a great workout. My shoulder was burning. And at the end, we came up with our recipe.”

That recipe produces a rich brown croissant with enough crispy flake to make you wish you had leaned a bit farther over the plate before taking the first bite. Croissants (even the one that was slightly blown out near the nose on our second visit) are texturally superb, buttery without being too greasy, shatter-crispy and audibly crunchy from end to end. Impressively, laminated pastries aren’t even among the top two reasons to visit Jinju: Lee’s otherworldly cakes and Caldwell’s gorgeous bonbons. Or even the top three, if you ask a neighborhood pooch: Caldwell and Lee bake their own dog treats in-house.

Bake time: Starts around 5 a.m. each day

Price: $4

Other laminates: Chocolate and chocolate-almond croissants with high-cacao milk chocolate batons; cinnamon-orange morning buns; ham, bacon and Gruyere croissants; seasonal savory tarts.

7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday-Monday; 4063 N. Williams Ave.; 503-828-7728; jinjupatisserie.com

The sourdough croissant at Tabor Bread replaces the typically subtle yeast notes with a noticeable tang.

No. 3: TABOR BREAD

Despite baking professionally for a dozen years, native Texan Daniel Rios was still surprised to find Tabor Bread’s sourdough croissant.

“You hardly ever see a croissant that's not made with a commercial yeast,” says Rios, now the Southeast Portland bakery’s operations manager. "The sugar content can be a difficult environment for natural yeast to flourish.”

But if any bakery was going to take a crack at making a naturally fermented croissant, it was Tabor Bread, the wood-fired, local-grain-milling sourdough bakery and occasional tango studio opened by Tissa Stein in a lovely Tudor building back in 2012. According to Rios, the trick lies in feeding the starter several times a day and in adding a bit of sugar to “temper” the yeast in advance. Doubling down on Portland-ness, Tabor Bread’s croissants are made with 50% or more whole grain, typically a blend of spelt and Edison Hard White Wheat, milled in house.

The result is a relatively diminutive croissant (Rios says they use between 95 and 110 grams of dough per pastry, though the croissants look smaller) that while unlikely to appear on the cover of Lamination Digest, does offer a satisfying contrast between softness and crunch. Though hardly traditional, the unusual flavor, with a front-and-center tang instead of the typically subtle yeast notes, propels Tabor Bread’s croissant into the top five.

Bake time: Before opening on select days

Price: $4.25

Other laminates: Tabor Bread makes roughly 10 butter croissants and six chocolate croissants per day, and not every day at that. Call ahead to make sure the pastries are on hand.

7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily, 5051 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd., 971-279-5530, taborbread.com

Ken’s Artisan Bakery located at 338 NW 21st Ave., Portland, Ore., Oct. 27, 2019. Mark Graves/Staff Mark Graves/The Oregonian

No. 2: KEN’S ARTISAN BAKERY

Ken Forkish opened his destination bakery on Northwest 21st Avenue in 2001. As with most things pastry and bread in these parts, you can divide Portland’s croissant history into two eras: before and after Ken’s.

At the time, the main players in the croissant game were Pearl Bakery and Grand Central Bakery, Forkish recalls. Older heads still reminisce over Le Panier, the now-Seattle-based bakery that once imported French ovens and the bakers to operate them (including future St. Honore Boulangerie owner Dominique Geulin) to its original Old Town location. But by the mid-2000s, Le Panier was gone, and Forkish had lapped the competition.

“It took me a little while to figure them out,” Forkish says of his croissants, which have reigned as Portland’s recognized gold standard for more than a decade. “It was a couple of years before I thought they were any good, and a couple of years after that before I was like, ‘Yeah, I get it now.’ ”

For Forkish, making a great croissant requires “doing 28 things right,” from the way you process and integrate the butter to the thickness of your laminated sheets to the time the dough is allowed to rise before baking to not overdoing it with the egg wash (Forkish asks for 80 percent coverage; any more can give the pastry a “factory finish”).

“If you miss on any one of those, it just won’t be as good,” he says.

With as many as six bake times each busy morning, Ken’s offers the best chance to find a croissant still warm from the oven. And the technique is unmistakable, with each butter croissant displaying an exquisitely rich golden color, an inviting egg wash and expertly laminated layering showing through between the shoulders. Over three visits, the croissants were puffier than their sisters at Trifecta Bakery (though Forkish says the recipe is the same). And participants in our blind taste test found the internal fluff more “bready” than the competition, not necessarily as a criticism. Still, we’re in the podium zone now. No matter which way you rank them, the croissants in our top three are as good as they come.

Bake time: Throughout the morning, with as many as six trays of butter croissants emerging from the oven between 6 and 11 a.m.

Price: $3.25

Other laminates: Chocolate croissants, ham and cheese croissants, Danish-esque “Oregon croissants” and cinnamon-orange zest morning buns, among others.

7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Saturday; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday; 338 N.W. 21st Ave., 503-248-2202, kensartisan.com

Nuvrei bakery located at 404 NW 10th Ave., Portland, Ore., Oct. 25, 2019. Mark Graves

No. 1: NUVREI

Perhaps no Portland baker is more comfortable tinkering with tradition — to tasty effect — than Nuvrei owner Marius Pop. Similar to the bagels at his Pop Bagels across the street, the croissants at Nuvrei almost belong in a different category, with their relatively small size (starting with about 70 grams of dough, compared with 110 grams at other bakeries on this list), relatively few folds and light, airy texture. Nuvrei’s croissants are a standard deviation away from Portland’s croissant norm.

They’re also gorgeous, and beautifully presented at Pop’s 8-year-old Pearl District bakery, which looks like what an Apple store cafe would look like if Apple stores had cafes. (Self-consciously so, it would seem, down to the “Mac Bar”-branded macaron counter.) Here in the upstairs cafe, laminated pastries dusted with bright green matcha powder or coated in a rose-syrup glaze are displayed on light boxes like the design objects they are.

Like any croissant obsessive, Pop can talk at length about the importance of hydration, fold technique, dough tension and butter ratios — he’s gone as low as 30 percent on that last one, which he found too bready, and as high as 50 percent, creating a croissant which when touched “left butter all over your hands,” Pop says. “I thought people would get grossed out by it.”

He’s even pinned down the ideal time to eat a croissant, and it’s not necessarily when it’s still hot.

“The best time to have a croissant is 30 minutes after it comes out of the oven, when all the juices have settled, like a steak,” Pop says. “That’s when everything is super flaky. If you eat it too soon it has this weird mouthfeel, this mushiness.”

No, it’s not traditional. But in an ocean of too-heavy croissants, Nuvrei is a life vest. The flavor is great, too — buttery with a subtle hint of yeast. Even deep in my research, I was able to eat a Nuvrei croissant with ease. I could have eaten two.

Bake time: Three bake times throughout the morning, one at 6 a.m., a second at 8 a.m., and a third between 10 and 11 a.m.

Price: $2.95 (the least expensive croissant we encountered)

Other laminates: Valrhona chocolate croissants, matcha croissants, rose croissants, sesame seed croissants (either solo or stuffed with ham and cheese), doughnut-esque sweet-cream-filled croissants and more.

7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Saturday; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday; 404 N.W. 10th Ave.; 503-972-1701; nuvrei.com

-- Michael Russell, mrussell@oregonian.com, @tdmrussell

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