It was created in 1860 by a baker named Yves-René Scordia in Douarnenez, a small fishing town on the coast of Finistère in western Brittany. The story goes that Scordia was short on viennoiserie dough and improvised with the bread dough he had on hand, working in the butter and sugar that Brittany had in abundance. The result was something entirely new — not quite bread, not quite pastry, not quite cake — and it became a local staple that stayed largely local for over a century.

Brittany’s butter is a significant part of this story. The region has a long tradition of high-fat, lightly salted butter that predates the national French preference for unsalted, and that salt — present in both the butter and often added separately — is what gives kouign-amann its edge. The slight salinity cuts through the richness and caramel and elevates the whole thing past what the ingredient list suggests it should be.

Outside of Brittany, kouign-amann spent decades as an obscure regional specialty before a wave of artisan bakeries in the U.S. and beyond picked it up in the early 2010s. It has since appeared in miniaturized, flavored, and otherwise adapted forms — kouignettes, fruit-filled versions, seasonal riffs — most of which miss the point. The original is a round, unadorned, aggressively buttered slab, and that’s enough.

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Regional Roots

• France