We Tried Pillsbury’s New Grands! Croissants

What’s better than a fresh-out-the-oven croissant? Not having to leave the house for one, that’s what. Enter Pillsbury, famous for their doughy, tubed products and ready-to-bake cookies that allow those of us with absolutely zero baking skills to enjoy fresh, hot treats at home. But what’s the worst part of those tubed croissants, cinnamon rolls, and cookie dough? When you inevitably smush the dough and ruin them, or you don’t anticipate how much they’ll expand, put them too close together, and create a freakish Cronenberg-esque blob on your baking sheet. Well, gone are those days.

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Back in August, Pillsbury launched Grands! Croissants in a butter and chocolate flavor and I got a taste. These morsels are fully-formed croissants that go straight from the freezer into the oven—no messing around with mushy dough. So, basically, they’re impossible to mess up. But how do they taste compared to a genuine bakery treat?

Butter

On the package, Pillsbury dubs the Grands! Croissants “large pastries,” but I think their definition of “large” is pretty loose here. Have you ever ordered a croissant from a French bakery? They’re roughly the size of a human head. The Grands! Croissants are a fraction of the size, but I won’t get too bogged down in this detail.

The butter version of the Grands! Croissants are exceptionally flakey on the outside. Inside, the pastry is a bit too chewy, which might appeal to some tastes and turn off others. There’s a potent butter flavor that makes these croissants tasty all on their own, but they could be made better with some upgrades. The butter flavor here is pretty robust and has some umami notes, so it’s giving savory to my palate. I’d smear some pesto and fresh veggies on this little croissant, or stuff it with some meat and cheese. Still, jam isn’t totally out of the question.

Chocolate

The humble chocolate croissant is such an underrated treat, and Pillsbury’s Grands! version is a shining example of this bakery staple, albeit on the tiny side. Like the butter version, the outside of the croissant is flakey (but not too flakey). Mine ended up slightly well done, which lent a nice toasty—slightly smoky even—flavor to the chocolate that I couldn’t get enough of. Also like the butter croissant, the chocolate Grands! was extra chewy, but the doughy chewiness worked a lot better in the dessert version of the pastry, for whatever reason. 

The chocolate was swirled around the croissant so that every bite was guaranteed to have enough and the cocoa flavor was excellent: not too dark and rich, but dark and robust enough that there was an explosion of flavor that paired really well with the natural butteriness of a croissant. It wasn’t too sweet at all either, which is a quality in a good chocolate croissant, if you ask me. Oftentimes I find that they’re a lot more “croissant” than “chocolate,” but that certainly wasn’t the case with this Pillsbury treat.