Enjoy Flaky, Buttery Goodness for Months with This Costco Croissant Hack

Laurel Randolph
Laurel Randolph
Laurel is a food writer, recipe developer, and editor. She is the author of four cookbooks, one of which was a #2 best-seller of 2017.
Follow
published Mar 31, 2022
pinterest
comments
We independently select these products—if you buy from one of our links, we may earn a commission. All prices were accurate at the time of publishing.
Frozen croissants
Credit: Sarah Crowley
I Tested All the Store-Bought Frozen Croissants I Could Get My Hands On — This One Rose Above the Rest

I have a love-hate relationship with Costco (hear me out! Don’t turn on me yet, internet!). As someone who lives with just one other person in an apartment, many items simply aren’t practical. As much as I want to buy giant boxes of laundry detergent and feast on an entire sheet cake, it just doesn’t make sense. That being said, there are plenty of things that make a membership worth it for my small family of two (and our tiny pantry).

Now, Michelle Lopez — also known as @hummingbirdhigh — has turned me onto a Costco item I’d never considered before. I’ve often bypassed the bakery section, as tempting as it is, assuming I couldn’t eat anything fast enough and would end up throwing out food. This includes Costco’s big packs of croissants, which are just $5 for 12 big pastries. While it’s an undeniably good deal, how do I eat that many croissants before they go stale?

With the help of my freezer, that’s how! As you can see in her Instagram video, Lopez uses a serrated knife to slice each leftover croissant in half before packing the “butter friends” in a zip-top bag and freezing them. She says they’ll keep for three months this way, and when she’s ready to enjoy one, she transfers a frozen half or two directly to the toaster oven and toasts until crispy. This way she can enjoy crispy, flaky croissants at a moment’s notice for bargain-basement prices.

This is such a simple but clever way to tackle the stale issue with Costco bulk bakery items. One of the best things about croissants is their crispy, flaky outer shell, and toasting halves from frozen would yield an extra crispy, crunchy pastry. Slather it with jam and you have a super-inexpensive breakfast hack that tastes like a treat.