- Michael Gebert
- Almond croissants at Beurrage
Are we entering a golden age of French pastry in Chicago? That might be a tall claim, but it’s a fact that within the last year we’ve had three new places open doing superb croissants and other pastries with classical technique. Two of them are in foodie parts of town; it’s not surprising that a Bad Wolf Coffee is making lush kouign-amann in Lakeview/Roscoe Village, or that Cellar Door Provisions is cranking out dark, crispy croissants in Logan Square.
One thing they didn’t make, though, was laminated pastry—the technical term for doughs made with alternating layers of butter and flour, usually produced by rolling the dough out thin, folding it over itself, and rolling it out again and again, until you have dozens, even hundreds of thin layers. It’s one of those things in baking where the technique itself is simple, but having the patience and diligence to do it perfectly is the challenge. “So that became my side obsession,” Hallenbeck says. “I would work all day for them, and then go home and make croissants. They had a broad approach, and I was interested in supplementing that with an obsessive approach.”
One thing that strikes you is how much variety there is to Hallenbeck’s offerings—it’s not a one-man bakery, he has at least one fellow baker most of the time, but still there are two or three kinds of croissants, half a dozen other pastries, three or four types of bread, and a couple of types of bagels and doughnuts on display at any time, many more choices than at the other bakeries I’ve named. I ask him how he decides what to make. “I get sort of bored easily,” he says. He makes different flavors based on seasonal fruits, but he’s also testing different products to find out both “what we like to make and what people are interested in buying.” For instance, he made cakes for a time for the farmers’ market, but doesn’t any more.
