When is a tin not a tin?

Answer: When it's a tube.

Let me explain. Some time ago, I was browsing the chilled food aisle of my local supermarket (yes, I do occasionally eat things that don't come out of tins) when my attention was caught by a tin on one of the refrigerator shelves. My initial thought was that it was something left there by one of those people who pick up an item, change their mind half way round the shop and then deposit it on a shelf wherever they happen to be at the time, the rogues. But no - there were a number of the same tins on the shelf - the product had clearly been stacked there intentionally. But what reason could there be for keeping tins in a fridge? The whole point of them is that they keep food preserved at ambient temperature.

Closer inspection revealed these mystery tins contained Jus-Rol "Bake it Fresh" dough for croissants, which started to make a little more sense, that being the sort of product you would expect to find in the chiller cabinet - if it was in a packet, that is. In a tin, what would the point be? It was only when I picked one up that I realised: while the ends were metal, giving it the look of a tin, the body was in fact a cylinder of cardboard. It was no more a tin than a tube of Pringles is. A loo roll masquerading as a tin, almost! No wonder it was in the fridge - even foil coated cardboard couldn't keep its contents preserved at room temperature for more than a few hours. Pah!

So, not being a tin, and in my opinion not a can either, strictly speaking it has no place on this blog. But in this case it was not  just the 'tin' but the contents too that interested me. You can buy some 'bake at home' products like rolls and baguettes which merely need to be popped straight into the oven from the packet and a few minutes later, they're done. But this tube clearly wasn't large enough to contain 6 fully-formed croissants, and as I read the label it became apparent that some self-assembly would be involved. An edible IKEA product, almost! It had to be tried.

Not being a real tin, it didn't require a tin opener to get into it, instead having a label to pull in order to rip open the cardboard, as per instruction number 1 on the side. No great surprise there, but it was instruction number 2 that really intrigued me - "the can will open itself". Ignoring the fact that the manufacturers were referring to it as a can (it's not), this couldn't really be self-opening packaging, could it? I gingerly pulled the corner of the red label as instructed - and incredibly, the dough inside immediately began to bulge and burst its way out of the cardboard - it truly was opening itself in front of my very eyes.

I removed the clammy cylinder from what remained of the tube, unrolled it and separated it along the perforations (which once again made me think of toilet roll) to give right-angled triangles of dough. These were then rolled up from the short side and curved slightly to give something resembling a croissant - in the very vaguest sense. I wasn't holding out all that much hope therefore that they would turn out to be very successful, but brushed them with a bit of milk nonetheless and popped them in the oven at 180 degrees.

15 minutes later, there was a wonderful smell filling the kitchen, and they came out looking golden brown and a lot more like croissants - in fact I was quite impressed by them, and excitedly sat down to two of them for breakfast with a nice coffee and some French jam, imagining myself in a little Parisian cafe overlooking the Seine. Albeit with the coffee served in a SPAM mug.


Perhaps inevitably though, they didn't quite live up to my daydream. While perfectly golden brown on the outside, the insides were a little underdone, with a texture that was still slightly doughy. With croissants that have completely cooked and puffed up in the middle, you are never really aware that they are formed from a roll of dough - they just become a crescent-shaped wodge of deliciousness - but here the roll unravelled slightly as I pulled it apart. They certainly weren't raw inside though, and the pastry itself where fully cooked was tasty enough. Being made with vegetable margarine though, it was never going to be able to hold a candle up to the delectable, melt-in-the-mouth flakiness of a proper, all-butter croissant.

Having come fresh out of the oven though, leaving my flat smelling if not like a French patisserie, then at the very least like a supermarket in-store bakery, they were by no means the worst croissants I have ever had. So, if you want to be able to convince yourself (almost) that you have made your own, without the bother of all that endless rolling of layers of butter and pastry, leaving it to chill and rest for hours in the fridge and so on - but with the excitement of packaging that opens itself, then ignore the fact that it's not a tin, and take the tube instead.