Perhaps you’ve experienced that cycle familiar to many home cooks: You come up with a recipe, it turns out reeeally well and so you end up making it a lot… until eventually, you get sick of it and move on, dusting that favorite off now and again. But Dominique Ansel, the creator of the cronut, has to eat one of his pastries every single day as part of his job. Poor guy.

In a video interview with Bloomberg as parts of its “Eureka!” series, Ansel explains how he came up with the idea for the immensely popular pastry that launched a thousand other frankenpastries.

When he was starting his bakery in 2011, he said he wanted to do a doughnut because well, this is America and we love our doughnuts. But being French, he didn’t have his own recipe. So he just decided to combine his beloved croissant with the traditional fried dough.

“I really love croissant and I wanted to combine some similar techniques and textures,” he explains, adding that it took him about three months of playing around before he came up with the final recipe.

The cronut arrived in 2013 and was greeted almost immediately by lengthy lines at the bakery from customers trying to get their hands on the limited amount offered every day.

No customer can beat Ansel’s cronut-eating record however, as he says he still eats one every single day.

“I do have to eat a cronut every day for quality control,” he says with a grin. “I know it’s a good excuse.”

Some people have all the luck.

The Father of the Cronut on How He Created a Pastry Revolution [Bloomberg]

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