by Metro Lifestyle Food
Alina Eisenhauer’s dosant, the fried croissant that apparently came long before Dominique Ansel’s cronut.
A baker in Worcester, Mass. is surprised at New York City’s cronut craze. She said she’s been making fried croissants—dosants, she calls them—for years.
Bad news, trendy New Yorkers: Looks like we’re not so ahead of the curve.
SoHo baker Dominique Ansel’s cronuts, the doughnut-croissant hybrid that has taken the city by storm, apparently have a predecessor — in Worcester, Mass.
“I just thought it was funny because everyone’s making such a huge deal out of them as if it’s this invention of the wheel or something,” said Alina Eisenhauer, the chef at Sweet Kitchen & Bar in Worcester who created the dosant, a little rectangular fried croissant filled with chocolate.
Dosants at Sweet are $9 for an order of three. They come warm, usually accompanied by caramel sauce, Eisenhauer said, though they also sometimes have seasonal sauces.
She said dosants are “really good with champagne or beer,” which Sweet serves as well.
Ansel trademarked his fiercely sought-after cronut, but Eisenhauer isn’t interested in doing the same.
She said it would only make sense if you were planning on mass-producing them, putting them on supermarket shelves or freezers, and wanted to avoid competition. Ansel, however, has reportedly said he has no intention of even making more than 250 cronuts per day.
Metro New York staffers tried some dosants (without champagne, sadly) and by and large, they were well-received (barring one shrugging review that they were “overrated”). The dosant is essentially a fried chocolate croissant, which no one objected to, though there was general agreement with Eisenhauer’s recommendation that the pastries be eaten warm.