Italian Cornetto Vs Croissant: Is There A Difference?

A delicately flaky and buttery French croissant needs no introduction, but an Italian cornetto might; if you've never heard of one. Put them side by side and you'll notice that the two types of pastries look quite similar, but what's under the hood is actually different enough to count. Understanding the difference all comes down to their basic ingredients.

Food TV personality and celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis has a brief explainer on her YouTube channel that dives into both how they're similar and how they're different. The doughs for both are laminated (or folded over and over again with layers of butter) and have the same basic crescent shape to them, which is why on the surface they look like each other. But it's what's in the dough that separates them. Croissants contain more butter than cornetti (which is the plural version of the word cornetto), but cornetti also contain one ingredient that croissants don't: eggs. 

Eggs are a key ingredient in both French brioche bread and cornetti. But to make things even more stressfully confusing, northern Italians have a habit of calling cornetti 'brioche'; even though that's widely understood to be a misnomer. So no, croissants and cornetti aren't the same thing, but in some parts of Italy, a cornetto is a brioche; and I totally get it if your head is spinning right now.

Don't get mad at me since I'm only the messenger, but a Cornetto (with a capital "C") can also refer to a different foodstuff altogether. That's because a Cornetto can refer to an Italian brand of prepackaged ice cream cones as well (which is owned by Unilever, who also owns brands like Ben and Jerry's). A Cornetto sort of resembles a flat-topped American Drumstick, and the word 'cornetto' actually means 'little horn' in Italian. This explains why both the pastry and the ice cream novelty can coexist together, since both do resemble little horns in their own way.

The Cornetto actually has a spot in pop culture history, too. If you're a fan of the movies "Shaun of the Dead", "Hot Fuzz", or "The World's End" (which are all movies starring actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), they're known as part of a loose group called the "Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy." The name is from the fact that Cornetto ice cream references show up in all three movies, even though the movies are narratively unrelated. That's just a fun fact to add if you're explaining to someone what the difference between a croissant, a cornetto, and a Cornetto is someday. Bonus points if you bring up the whole northern Italian 'brioche' thing, too.