The true, sincere difference between Brioche, Croissant, and Cornetto

4 min read

4 hours ago Danilo

Brioche, Cornetto, or Croissant?
Good question.
It’s around 7:30 in the morning, and we’re at a café. While someone in Northern Italy is having breakfast with a cappuccino and a brioche, someone else in Naples is enjoying a cappuccino and a cornetto. But are they actually eating the same thing?
The answer is probably yes—at least in Italy—because they are most likely eating the same pastry, and calling it a “brioche” is simply a widespread misuse of the term. A true brioche is different from a cornetto, but here’s the catch: neither of them is a croissant!
At the café counter, the three names may seem interchangeable, but brioche, cornetto, and croissant refer to distinct products. The differences involve ingredients, preparation methods, shape, traditions, and even history!

A brioche is essentially a type of dough that can take many forms. From a production standpoint, it is the simplest of the three, as it is made using a direct dough method in which all the ingredients are mixed together from the start.
It originated in Normandy in the 16th century as an adaptation of the medieval pâte à brioche. Unlike cornetti and croissants, a brioche typically has a rounded shape and often features a small ball of dough on top.
Traditional French brioche is a rich, leavened pastry made with butter, flour, sugar, eggs, yeast, water, and lard. It contains more butter and sugar than its cousins, making it softer, richer, and more pillowy.
The ingredients are mixed and left to rise before baking.
There is no lamination process involved, and the final shape can vary greatly.
For this reason, a brioche is not necessarily the classic crescent-shaped pastry commonly found in Italian cafés. Rather, it refers primarily to a type of dough characterized by its softness, sweetness, and relatively compact structure compared with the other two pastries.

The cornetto descends from a traditional Viennese pastry known as the kipfel, a crescent-shaped specialty that could be either sweet or savory.
It is believed that the kipfel arrived in Italy in 1683 during a period of commercial exchange between the Republic of Venice and Vienna, eventually evolving into the cornetto thanks to the creativity of Venetian pastry chefs.
Once again, the key difference lies in the ingredients.
A cornetto is made with flour, milk, eggs, sugar, salt, butter, and yeast, and it may be served plain or filled.
The preparation method is different as well. The dough is laminated through repeated folds with butter, creating its characteristic internal layers. The result is a pastry that is lighter and more airy than traditional brioche.
Although it shares common origins with the croissant, the cornetto evolved according to different tastes and traditions, and It is typically filled with pastry cream, jam, or chocolate.

The croissant is also a laminated pastry, but its recipe differs from that of the cornetto.
Although it ultimately derives from the same Viennese kipfel, the croissant emerged later, specifically after the opening of the Boulangerie Viennoise in Paris in 1838.
Its ingredients are nearly identical to those of the cornetto, with one notable exception: eggs are omitted, although egg white is sometimes brushed onto the surface before baking to achieve a deeper golden color.
Without eggs in the dough, the flavor of butter becomes more pronounced, giving the croissant its unmistakable taste and its lighter, flakier texture compared with its cousin cornetto.
In France, croissants are generally not filled with cream or chocolate. For that, there is the pain au chocolat, made from a similar laminated dough and filled with delicious pieces of chocolate.
The lower sugar content also promotes stronger fermentation and a more open, airy crumb structure. This is the fundamental difference between a croissant and a cornetto.
The two pastries may look very similar and are often confused with one another, but they are built on different balances of ingredients and technique. That is why, technically speaking, calling everything a brioche is incorrect: behind what seems like the same name can lie very different preparations.

While the technical distinctions between brioche, cornetto, and croissant are well defined, in Italy—and in many other parts of the world—the issue remains largely linguistic.
In recent years, the term croissant has become increasingly popular thanks to the rise of French-inspired bakeries. Nevertheless, in everyday language, brioche continues to dominate, and it remains the term most non-French speakers use to describe the classic pastry served at cafés, regardless of the recipe actually used.