Croffle — the croissant pressed in a waffle iron

i. Origin & history

The croffle is a very young dessert, and its history is mostly a story of social media. The idea of pressing croissant dough in a waffle iron is generally credited to Louise Lennox, a baker in Dublin, who is reported to have sold croissant-waffles around 2017. Whether she was strictly the first is impossible to prove — bakers have been putting leftover dough into waffle irons for as long as both have existed — but hers is the name most often attached to the word.

What made the croffle famous happened in South Korea. Around 2019 and 2020 it became one of the defining items of Seoul's café culture, where independent coffee shops compete on photogenic desserts as much as on coffee. Cafés took the plain pressed croissant and built it into a plated dessert: a scoop of ice cream, a drizzle of syrup, a dusting of powder, a shaving of Norwegian brown cheese. Home cooks followed, helped by the easy availability of frozen raw croissant dough, known in Korean bakeries as saengji (생지, 'raw dough'). Within a year croffles were on café menus across East and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America.

The name is a portmanteau in the same family as the cronut, the croissant-doughnut hybrid that set off the fashion for laminated-dough mash-ups in 2013. In Korean it is written 크로플 (keuropeul), a direct transliteration of the English word. 'Croffle' does not mean anything beyond the two words it fuses: croissant plus waffle.

It is worth separating the croffle from things it resembles. It is not a Liège waffle, which is a yeasted brioche-like dough studded with pearl sugar; it is not a waffle made from batter at all; and it is not a cronut, which is fried. A croffle is simply laminated dough — butter folded into a yeasted dough in dozens of thin layers — cooked under pressure between two hot plates.

ii. What the waffle iron does to laminated dough

In an oven, a croissant rises because the water in its butter layers turns to steam and pushes the sheets of dough apart, while the butter fat keeps those sheets separate. A waffle iron interrupts that process. The plates clamp down on the dough, so it can only expand into the grid of the iron, and the layers that would have puffed upwards are instead pressed into thin, dense, very crisp ridges.

The contact is also far more direct than in an oven. Every ridge of the waffle pattern touches hot metal, so butter that melts out of the layers fries the surface of the dough from the outside. This is why a good croffle is crisper and more deeply browned than any croissant: it has been part baked, part shallow-fried in its own butter.

Sugar is the third element. Rolling the dough in sugar before it goes in the iron gives a glassy, caramelised crust where the sugar meets the plates. Granulated sugar melts and caramelises quickly; pearl sugar holds its shape longer and gives crunchy nuggets. Either way, the sugar burns if the iron is too hot, which is why croffles are cooked at a medium-high rather than maximum setting.

Finally, raw dough and baked croissants behave differently. Raw dough, thawed until pliable but still cool, gives the best croffle: it has not yet set, so it fills the grid and cooks through in the iron, taking five to seven minutes. An already baked croissant only needs to be crisped and flattened, which takes one to two minutes; it is a perfectly good way to use day-old pastry, but the texture is drier and less layered.

iii. Ingredients

Makes 4 servings · scroll the side panel to adjust

• 4 frozen unbaked croissants (about 60–70 g each), or 280 g all-butter croissant dough
• 40 g pearl sugar or granulated sugar
• 15 g unsalted butter, melted, for the iron
• 1 pinch flaky sea salt
• 4 scoops vanilla ice cream, to serve
• 2 tbsp maple syrup or honey, to serve
• 1 tsp cinnamon or icing sugar, to dust (optional)

The single most important choice is all-butter croissant dough. Dough made with margarine or vegetable shortening will press and brown, but it lacks the flavour that the butter frying on the plates provides. Frozen unbaked croissants — the kind sold to be proved and baked at home — are what most Korean cafés and home cooks use; they need only partial thawing. Puff pastry works as a substitute but is unyeasted, so the result is flatter, flakier and more like a palmier than a croissant. Pearl sugar gives crunchy pockets of sugar, while granulated sugar gives a more even, glassy caramel. A little salt over the hot croffle makes the caramel taste less flatly sweet.

iv. Method

1. Take the frozen croissants out of the freezer and leave them at room temperature for 20–30 minutes, until they bend without cracking but still feel cold. Do not let them prove; soft, warm dough will stick and smear.
2. Heat a waffle iron to medium-high. A Belgian-style iron with deep pockets gives the most dramatic ridges, but any iron works.
3. Unroll each croissant slightly and press it gently into a flatter, rounder shape with your palm. Tip the sugar onto a plate and press both sides of each croissant into it so the sugar sticks.
4. Brush the plates lightly with melted butter. Lay one or two croissants in the centre of the iron, leaving room for them to spread, and close the lid. Press down firmly for the first few seconds.
5. Cook for 5–7 minutes, without opening the iron for the first 4 minutes, until the croffle is a deep amber all over and the caramel has stopped bubbling at the edges. If using already baked croissants, 1–2 minutes is enough.
6. Lift the croffle out with a heatproof spatula or tongs and set it on a wire rack for 1 minute; the caramel crisps as it cools slightly. Sprinkle with a pinch of flaky salt.
7. Wipe any burnt sugar from the plates with a folded paper towel held in tongs, brush with a little more butter, and cook the rest.
8. Serve warm, topped with a scoop of ice cream, a drizzle of maple syrup or honey and a dusting of cinnamon or icing sugar.

v. Tips & common mistakes

• Cook from cold, not proved, dough. Proved croissants are full of gas and soft butter; the iron squashes them into a greasy, dense sheet. Dough that is pliable but still cold keeps its layers distinct.
• Turn the heat down from maximum. Raw dough needs several minutes to cook through, and on the highest setting the sugar burns long before the centre is done. Medium-high gives time for both.
• Leave the lid shut. Opening the iron early tears the crust, because the caramel has not yet released from the plates. Wait until the steam escaping from the sides has slowed to a trickle.
• Clean the plates between batches. Caramelised sugar left on the iron scorches during the next round and gives the croffle a bitter, burnt taste and dark spots.
• Rest it on a rack, not a plate. Steam trapped underneath a croffle on a plate softens the crisp base within a minute.
• Add ice cream at the last moment. A croffle is a contrast of hot and cold, crisp and soft; topped too early, it goes soggy before it reaches the table.

vi. Variations

Korean cafés developed most of the variations now seen worldwide. The brown cheese croffle, topped with fine shavings of Norwegian brunost, was one of the first viral versions; the caramel notes of the cheese echo the sugar crust. The honey-butter croffle is brushed with honey butter straight out of the iron. Lotus or Biscoff croffles are spread with speculoos cookie paste — a nod to the Belgian and Dutch speculaas biscuit — and injeolmi croffles are dusted with roasted soybean powder in the style of Korean rice cakes. Matcha, tiramisu and strawberry-cream croffles are common café menu items.

Savoury versions are just as widespread: croffles sandwiching ham and cheese, or topped with a fried egg, smoked salmon or bacon, work because unsweetened croissant dough is essentially a bread. Some cafés use the croffle as a base for bingsu or serve mini croffles alongside it.

Its relatives are the other dough-in-a-mould sweets of East Asia — the fish-shaped bungeoppang and the Hong Kong egg waffle — and the Western laminated hybrids such as the cronut.

vii. Serving & storage

Croffles are a café dessert and a weekend breakfast, eaten warm, within a few minutes of leaving the iron, with coffee. They are cut with a knife and fork when heavily topped, or eaten by hand when plain. Ice cream, whipped cream, fresh berries, syrup and nut spreads are the standard partners; a sharp fruit such as raspberries helps balance the butter and caramel.

They are best eaten immediately. Leftover croffles can be kept in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a day and reheated in a hot waffle iron for 30–60 seconds, or in an air fryer at 180 °C (350 °F) for 2–3 minutes, which restores much of the crispness. Do not refrigerate them, which makes them stale and chewy. The best make-ahead strategy is to keep a bag of frozen unbaked croissants ready and cook croffles to order.

ix. More from Korean

• Hotteok — Korean filled pancakes
• Bungeoppang — fish-shaped pastries
• Bingsu — Korean shaved ice
• Cronut — croissant-doughnut hybrid
• Egg Waffle — Hong Kong bubble waffle
• Belgian Waffles — yeasted Liège waffles