Bakery Break-in and Burglary: Only Recipes are Taken

[Shel_B]

Clickhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/us/crooks-caper-at-san-francisco-bakery-leave-the-cash-take-the-cruffin-recipe.html?_r=0 

I posted this three times and the links don't work.  I'm done here ....

Edited March 10, 2015 by Shel_B (log)

[GlorifiedRice]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/us/crooks-caper-at-san-francisco-bakery-leave-the-cash-take-the-cruffin-recipe.html

[Smithy]

I'm glad he had copies of the recipes elsewhere; otherwise that would have been a devastating theft. What a strange burglary!

I hadn't heard of cruffins before. They sound delicious.

[cakewalk]

That's very strange for a lot of reasons. Cronuts became similarly popular here, and then they were imitated all over the place. No one had to steal a recipe. Coming up with the idea is the unique part. (In fact I'd question if the "cruffin" would ever have existed if the "cronut" hadn't been developed first.) But once the idea is out there, anyone who bakes could work out a recipe and a method to copy it. That's what happens all the time. So the theft doesn't really make sense in terms of the cruffin alone. I wonder if he was trying to develop other unique items, and someone wanted to mine his notes for ideas that are still at the unfinished stages. To me the whole thing sounds vindictive more than it sounds competitive. (Or it could be a really nice publicity piece, although I don't really think so.)

[Lisa Shock]

I have found that it's really difficult to get people to follow recipes (whether it's lazy employees or managers who want to put their personal 'twist' on a recipe), so, chances are that even if a competing bakery took the recipes, they won't make the products exactly the same way.

[Drewman]

Nothing more than my opinion, but in the end, I bet he did it himself for the exposure. 

[IndyRob]

Nothing more than my opinion, but in the end, I bet he did it himself for the exposure. 

 

That's my bet.  Your Cruffin didn't get Cronut-level press?  Make up a cloak and dagger caper involving a rare gem.

 

Mr. Stephen, an Australian who trained in Paris, said that whoever filched the cruffin recipe would find it of limited value. The recipe does not describe Mr. Stephen’s technique of making the dough (Day 1), buttering and repeatedly folding the dough (Day 2), and then baking the pastries (Day 3). Nor does it say that the butter must be imported from Isigny-sur-Mer, France (though this article does).

 

Yeah, like there are very few pastry chefs that would know how to do that.  Or how to put croissant dough in a muffin tin.