This golden, curved Argentine pastry is ‘better than a croissant’. Here’s where to find it in Sydney

A medialuna has the same crescent-moon shape as a croissant. It shares the same golden-brown colour and ridged outer crust. Both are laminated and filled with buttery layers. And both are eaten with tea or coffee as a way to start the day.

Ask an Argentine, though, and they’ll tell you the two are completely different.

“Medialunas look like croissants, but they are smaller, softer, sweeter … and better,” says Lourdes Abboud, co-owner of medialuna bakery Tuki in Darlinghurst. “Nobody in Argentina eats a croissant – no way.”

Medialuna, Spanish for half moon, is a staple pastry across Argentina and Uruguay. The main difference between a French and “Argentinian croissant” is the dough, which is enriched with eggs for a softer, brioche-like crumb, sweetened with honey and vanilla, then brushed with hot sugar syrup for a glossy, sticky glaze.

The other difference is how many you eat, says Xavier Ambrosio, owner of coffee caravan Patagonia Cafe in Brookvale. “You usually buy a dozen medialuna, and eat three or four in one go.”

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It’s tough work slinging medialunas in a croissant city like Sydney, which may be why so few bakeries attempt them. That, or it’s the labour involved. A proper medialuna takes two to three days to make, thanks to its long fermentation period and extended resting times. For Nicolás Arratta from online bakery Titto by Coco, the effort is worth it. “It’s more than a pastry, it’s a memory, it’s a feeling, it’s a taste of home.”

“Argentine pastries crafted with love and lots of butter,” is the slogan for Tuki bakery. They mean it too, the half-moon pastries are 30 per cent butter. Abboud and partner Mauro Cardoselli left careers in architecture and law to live out their dream of making medialunas full time, originally expecting to sell about 50 per week. These days, it’s closer to 1500.

The pair bake out of a rented kitchen in Surry Hills and sell the medialunas in boxes of three, six and 12 from their terrace house in Darlinghurst. Cardoselli, who trained at a pastry school in Tucumán in Argentina, spends 48 hours on each batch, resting the dough for eight hours between folds.

It shows in the final product, which has an elegant honeycomb structure and soft, melting texture that collapses in the mouth. The flavour is gently sweet, lifted by the perfume of orange peel in the glaze. They come picnic-ready too: uniformly shaped, neatly piped with dulce de leche (milk caramel) or crema pastelera (vanilla custard), and packed into sky-blue cake boxes for takeaway.

By day, pastry chef Nicolás Arratta rolls croissants at Cherry Moon General Store in Annandale. By night, he bakes medialunas for his online bakery, Titto by Coco.

Arratta grew up behind the counter of his parents’ panaderia, Le Exquisitee, in Buenos Aires, where his brother Titto taught him how to make medialunas. These days he bakes them from his home kitchen in Zetland. “I don’t have a dough sheeter or anything like that, I just roll the dough out with a rolling pin,” he says.