You don't have to go to Paris for these French pastries that taste as good as they look
In theory, the croissant hot dog from Beurre Sec shouldn’t work.
The light, flaky pastry crumbles at the slightest pressure yet supports a hearty all-beef frankfurter. Neither buttery French pastry nor Chicago hot dog yields to the other in a cultural clash of culinary staples.
Somehow, it totally works.
To the customer, the croissant dog is simultaneously an exotic spectacle and a familiar comfort.
To Chantell Kayyod, it’s thousands of hours, hundreds of errors, multiple trips across the Atlantic and one childhood dream that refused to die.
Kayyod is the 27-year-old pâtissier behind Beurre Sec, a pastry pop-up based in Indianapolis. Over the last year, Kayyod has held more than 20 pop-ups, where she sells authentic French pastries ripped straight from an eater's sweetest dreams.
Kayyod's love of food traces back to the kitchen of her childhood home in Indianapolis, where she watched her Persian father overturn pots of tahdig to reveal the crispy underside of the buttery, saffron-flavored rice. Near the end of elementary school, she began mixing and chopping whatever her Ukrainian mother and stepfather needed for dinner.
“My favorite moments with them were when they would cook,” Kayyod said.
Following her parents' divorce when she was three, Kayyod went on multiple family trips to France with her mother and stepfather, who went to school in Paris and helped develop Kayyod's love for French cuisine. After Kayyod graduated from Ball State University in 2018, she worked at Lulu’s Coffee and Bakehouse on 86th Street while interning for a local advertising agency.
Sejal Patel, who has owned and operated Lulu’s for nearly eight years, quickly recognized Kayyod’s talent.
“She was definitely someone you could tell was always going to exceed what my other bakers could do,” Patel said. “She has a passion unlike anything I’ve seen.”
That passion helped propel Kayyod through pastry school at Paris' Le Cordon Bleu in 2019, where she said she occasionally had panic attacks during intense practical exams. She’d run from station to station, desperately trying to shape delicate sugar sculptures while a timer in her head raced toward zero.
“They’re melting in your hands and I’m in tears trying to get everything to set,” she said. “Every day I felt like I was on a ‘Chopped’ episode.”
After Kayyod returned to the United States with a diplôme de pâtisserie, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Living with her family in Indianapolis, Kayyod did what many Americans did during lockdown: she baked. A lot.
The kitchen swelled with the fragrances of pastries, Danishes, choux, tarts and other treats that Kayyod baked and sold to friends at their insistence. She started an Instagram account where she posted her most photogenic creations. Thousands of likes and adoring comments followed.
In early 2022, Patel encouraged Kayyod to try a pop-up pastry sale and offered use of Lulu’s’ kitchen and storefront. On Sept. 24, 2022, Kayyod made her foray into professional baking with Beurre Sec.
Beurre Sec, French for dry butter, pays homage to the primary ingredient in French viennoiserie, the French style of baked goods featuring laminated dough. At 84% butterfat by weight, beurre sec is more pliable and resistant to heat, ideal for the series of rolls and folds called lamination that set these pastries apart.
During lamination, layers of solid butter and dough fold on top of one another, becoming almost imperceptibly thin but still distinct from one another. Bite into a Beurre Sec croissant, and over a dozen layers of dough shatter in crunchy harmony, giving way to the fluffy honeycomb of the interior.
The path to perfect pastry is clear in theory, but often perilous in practice.
“Everything’s temperamental,” Kayyod said.
The temperature of the kitchen, the length of the proof, the gluey egg wash applied for browning, even the heat of the pâtissier’s hands — anything used to create a perfect golden, airy croissant could just as easily yield an unrisen mishap.
Navigating those obstacles requires countless hours of practice. It also means eating a whole lot of butter. The years-long quest has taken a toll on Kayyod.
“I don’t even eat the croissants anymore because I just don’t like the smell of butter anymore,” Kayyod said.
Nor is the olfactory barrage the worst part of the job for Kayyod. She said when she finally sits down after hours of standing, she can feel it in her feet.
“You have to take care of your body in this field,” she said. “It’s not easy, it’s very labor intensive. If you can’t use your body, you can’t do anything.”Kayyod learned that the hard way earlier this year. One morning during a pop-up, she began experiencing awful abdominal pains. Afterward she went to the emergency room, where doctors diagnosed her with endometriosis and recommended surgery.
In the days between her diagnosis and her surgery, Kayyod couldn’t stand for extended periods, lift heavy objects or bend over. She grew anxious about the operation. One way Kayyod copes with stress is grabbing at her throat.
On one of the many stressful days leading up to her surgery, she felt a lump.
Doctors thought it might be thyroid cancer and Kayyod scheduled a second surgery.
But the tumor on her thyroid came back benign. Kayyod's strength hasn’t fully returned since the surgery in April, but by July she was back in the kitchen.
Where to find Beurre Sec pop-ups
Just past 8 a.m. on a recent Sunday, customers streaming into Lulu's crane their necks at a small exhibit of pastries on the counter.
Pearls of choux pastry bursting with cool vanilla coffee cream blossom into a flower-shaped St. Honoré. Alsatian kouglofs conceal crunchy almond slivers and plump golden raisins in a little cloud of citrus-soaked brioche. Slivers of pear nestle into a toasty almond flour crust that snaps sweetly as you bit into the tarte bourdaloue.
Two hours later, the last customer exits, toting a white paper box. Kayyod sits down to her morning coffee, seven hours after she woke up. Patel and a few other Lulu’s employees helped her throughout the pop-up, but she's exhausted. Still, she said, she feels great.
“I’m always happy during the process,” Kayyod said. “Yes, it’s stressful. I’m losing my mind. But I still enjoy it in that sense, where I feel accomplished even though it’s long hours.”
Patel said she’s confident Kayyod will succeed. She remembers the 22-year-old who outpaced more experienced bakers, the friend who brought back gifts from Paris and checked in on Lulu’s during the pandemic.
“My gosh, that girl is so passionate about everything she does,” Patel said. “She’s that caring of a human being, too. Everyone comes before her.”
Between the pop-ups she announces on Beurre Sec's Instagram, Kayyod searches for retail space to open a brick-and-mortar location. But rent isn’t cheap. Labor isn’t cheap, either. Rising costs and understaffing were major concerns for most restaurants nationally last year.
Kayyod knows from experience that staff turnover is common in the food industry. Still, she said she doesn’t feel ready to have someone walk out on her.
“I haven’t really prepped myself mentally for that yet,” Kayyod said.
In Kayyod's world, everything’s temperamental. Countless things can go wrong. She said she sometimes worries enough customers won't be willing to buy deluxe specialty pastries to sustain business.
In theory, a high-end artisanal cross-cultural pastry shop in Indianapolis shouldn’t work.
Then again, neither should a croissant hot dog.
Contact dining and drinks reporter Bradley Hohulin at bhohulin@gannett.com. You can follow him on Twitter @bradleyhohulin.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Where to find Beurre Sec authentic French pastries in Indianapolis
