Palets de Pont-Aven – Thick Breton Butter Cookies

Palets de Pont-Aven, thick-baked and melt-in-the-mouth

Traou Mad's Palets de Pont-Aven are thick, melt-in-the-mouth butter cookies from Brittany, baked with 33% fresh butter and Guérande salt. They are the biscuit factory’s founding pastry from 1920 and remain their most famous product to this day.

Palets de Pont-Aven are round, thick Breton butter cookies from the Traou Mad biscuit factory in Finistère. Where other cookies crunch, the palet gives way and melts. Each 100g box contains the pastry that Alexis Le Villain invented in 1920, which made the company famous. Thick, crumbly, and rich with butter.

It melts instead of crunching

The first bite is soft, then the palet slowly dissolves on the tongue, buttery, gentle, with a trace of salt that lingers long afterwards.

The secret lies in the height and the egg yolk. Because only the yolk goes into the dough rather than the whole egg, the crumb becomes richer and softer, and a little whole milk makes it completely supple. A pinch of baking soda causes the thick dough to rise in the oven, ensuring the palet remains airy rather than becoming a dense block. Pure craftsmanship, well hidden.

With 33% butter, it is the richer of the two Pont-Aven classics and at the same time the more understated: a palet contains only two-thirds of the sugar found in the thin galette. More butter, less sweetness, more Guérande salt – that is how the difference tastes.

With coffee, cider, and a spoonful of mousse

Have a palet with your morning coffee, and your day is made: this thick pastry satisfies, where a thin cookie only whets the appetite.

Because it is not overly sweet, it pairs magnificently with sweet accompaniments—a spoonful of chocolate mousse, a dollop of caramel, or a scoop of vanilla ice cream. In Brittany, it is often served with a glass of brut cider, whose acidity joyfully cuts through the butter. A strong black tea also suits it well, as its bitterness provides a nice contrast to the rich crumb.

And if you enjoy baking, the palet is your best friend: crumbled and kneaded with a little butter, it makes the crumbliest tart crust you can imagine, with a salty note included. Add a lemon filling on top, and that's all such a crust needs anyway.

Kept well-sealed and stored in a dry place, it stays as crumbly as on the first day for weeks. Once opened, however, the box rarely lasts long enough to prove it.

The first-born from Pont-Aven

Traou Mad means "good things" in Breton, and the palet was the first of them. It was with this biscuit that baker Alexis Le Villain founded his factory in Pont-Aven in 1920.

It was not until thirty years later, under his daughter Marguerite, that the flatter sibling, the galette, was added. To this day, the box reads "Les Palets de Pont-Aven"—a protected name that only this house is allowed to use, and a promise that the recipe has kept for over a hundred years.

They are baked in the town itself, using butter from Maison Le Gall in Quimper, eggs from Finistère, Guérande salt, and wheat flour from the mill in Pont-Aven. With a one-third butter content, this choice significantly impacts how the palet tastes—Le Gall has been maturing cream and churning butter in barrels since 1923.

Mixing the dough, cutting the butter, shaping, taking them off the tray—this is the handiwork for which the biscuit factory has held the French "Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant" (Living Heritage Company) label since 2015. Truly impressive.

Since the 1980s, the tins have featured motifs by Paul Gauguin, who, like many painters, spent his summers at the mouth of the Aven. Since 2012, Traou Mad has been part of Loc Maria Biscuits, under whose roof the paper-thin Gavottes crêpes are also made. Anyone wishing to try both Pont-Aven classics side-by-side will find them in the Traou Mad range—the palet is its rich beginning.