We’ll get to today’s tip in a minute or so. But here’s what inspired it.

Frenchly.us is a website for Francophiles in the U.S. that covers news, arts, culture, style and all things French.

Which includes food.

In the past, the website sponsored a Best Baguette competition in different cities, naming some 15 finalists from the best in bakeries the city. Buy a ticket, and taste them all in one place.

This year it was the Best Croissant competition, which we attended recently. If you’re a croissant lover, imagine being in a venue with the city’s 15 best croissant bakers, who bid you to sample as much as you’d like.

More than 700 eager eaters went from station to station in a Manhattan location, eating as much as they desired. How many croissants do you think you can eat?

We’d be stuffed at two…although we calculated that if we only ate two bites of 15 croissants, that would be about three croissants.

But the bakeries brought more than classic croissants. They brought almond croissants, chocolate croissants (pain au chocolat), specialty flavors like pistachio, along with muffins, fruit breads and rustic loaves.

Plus unlimited coffee, tea, jam, butter, and other French delights like pâté.

What’s a taster to do?

For one thing, don’t order the optional brunch. You won’t have room to sample the cornucopia of croissants.

The competing bakeries are shown in image #2.

While every bakery’s products were of the highest quality, participants were asked to vote for their favorites.

And the winners are…

 
 
PARTY IDEA!

Coordinate your own Best Croissant competition. Ask friends and family to bring the best from their neighborhoods.

You can do this with any food, from eclairs to chicken wings. Our friend Cricket has an annual Super Bowl event where everyone brings their favorite wings for a wing-off.

[2] The 15 finalists in the 2018 Best Croissant competition.

Croissants are breakfast breads, traditionally a breakfast bread served with jam and butter, and coffee.

Variations include the almond croissant, filled with frangipane and topped with sliced almonds, and the “chocolate croissant,” correctly called pain au chocolat, baked with a piece of dark chocolate in the center.

There are also pretzel croissants, which adapt German soft pretzel dough into the crescent shape.

The rich, buttery, crescent-shaped rolls are made of puff pastry. Puff pastry layers yeast dough with alternate layers of butter, a process known as laminating.

Stories that the roll was made in the shape of the crescent of the Turkish flag, after the defeat of the Turks in the Siege of Vienna in 1683, are a perpetuated myth.