Hey everyone! My name is Natalie and I am in my kitchen and today we are making Gourmet Pop Tarts. That is direct reference to how the popular show :Gourmet Makes on YouTube by the magazine Bon Appetit. The host of the show is chef, Claire Saffitz. Her show is about taking iconic or fan favorite treats and making them gourmet. Who hasn’t eaten a Pop Tart? My personal favorite was the Brown Sugar Cinnamon or the Smores Pop Tart.
The whole reason I even attempted to make these Pop Tarts is became Bon Appetit is challenging fans of the show to use the recipe, but also make it their own. Film it and submit your thoughts and recreations! So naturally, a HUGE fan and a lover of baking, this was the perfect distraction during quarantine. The recipe is to make nine strawberry Pop Tarts. So, naturally I made 3 strawberry, 3 blackberry lemon, and 3 chocolate cinnamon. Here is the link to the Bon Appetit recipe if you would like to make it yourself, I highly recommend it! https://www.bonappetit.com/story/claire-saffitz-gourmet-pop-tarts
It started like many other dishes that I have made recently with lots of COLD butter! I have to say after completing this recipes and a few others as of late, I SUCK at making dough into squares like can’t we all just agree that ovals work just as well? Anyways I made the dough by first mixing my dry ingredients and than quickly grating cold butter into the bowl. Before I grate the butter in, I kid you not, I had to toss the butter in the flour first. Guy, I’ve made a lot of things, but Bon Appetit is pushing me into uncharted waters. It makes a dough very similar to a quality pie crust.
Seeing all that butter grated into a nice heaping pile was very nice to look at! Tip: in the directions it says the dough will come together with kneading and water, but watch the video. I was struggling to get my dough to come together and I watch Claire get it to come together in a food processor and boy did that work! If you don’t have a food processor, small batches in a blender works too. With my dough chilling the fridge for awhile I need to make my fillings because they need to be cool before going into the dough.
To make any fruit filling it is pretty easy, just like making a jam. If you think making jam is hard, just read the recipe. I promise you going forward you will not fear making a quick jam to impress your friends at your brunch! Literally, equal parts fruit to sugar, cook on medium heat until fruit starts to breakdown and bubble. Continue to cook until you have reached the texture you like. Now for the purpose of this recipe I needed the filling to be very thick so per the recipe I continued to cook it in the oven. I’ll tell you guys this was the weirdest thing I have ever done! Spreading out hot jam onto a silicon matt to cook in the oven.
With the fillings cooking away in the oven I moved onto my personal favorite the chocolate filling! I am a chocoholic! Now to be clear dark chocolate only, none of this milk and white chocolate people. I started with the idea of making a really thick chocolate guanche, sounds fancy, but super easy to make! Again, easy recipe to impress; great to dip fruit in, dip cookies, or over ice cream! Chocolate chips and heavy cream; it is a 1:1 ratio. Heat up the cream until it starts to develop a skin, pour chocolate in and stir until thickened.
This recipe takes a lot of wait time to make sure all the parts are cool and ready to be made. I preheat my oven like instructed to 300, but in the future I will crank it up about 20 degrees or so. Laugh as you may, but I don’t have a ruler or such and when a recipe says 14 by 10 inches I need to measure it out. I wanted these to be perfect! I fit had to cut the dough in half to make the bottom sheet. I rolled the dough out to be 14 by 10 and then scored out the areas I would be placing filling,
Once everything looked right, I took my fillings out of the fridge to start filling the insides of my pop tarts! I was going to end up with three of each flavor. I used a angled spatula to fill in the pop tarts to achieve a nice even layer.
With the filling in, I placed that in the fridge while I rolled out the other half of the dough to over my pop tarts. I missed a step where I didn’t use egg whites to help seal my two pastry sheets together and man would that have helped! So please use egg whites to wash around the fillings before placing you dough on top. Once the second sheet in laid out, carefully smooth out the dough around the filling to reduce any air pockets. As well as light press the sheets together where there is egg wash. When the pop tarts look good take a knife or dough cutter and cut the pop tarts out.
After they set up again in the fridge they were ready for the oven! As the baked almost twice the amount of time that the recipe instructed. This was the day I discovered how off my oven is! So while they baked I made the frostings. You can do it two ways. Make a thicker icing and then flood it or do it the way I did and just make the loose frosting. I think if I was going to serve these to guest and not just my husband I would have done the flooding method. I made the classic white (vanilla) frosting, lemon, and cinnamon sugar. The recipe they provide does include how to make sprinkles, but at 11 o’clock at night I wasn’t about to make homemade sprinkles today!
With the Pop tarts out of the oven the only thing to do is ice and film my submission video! I have to say I tried all of them and of course I am bias and think the chocolate is the best. My husband personally liked the lemon blackberry out of the lot. I have to say that I would for sure try this again and make it for myself and others! Give it a go and have some fun toasting your own pop tarts in the morning! Or maybe try freezing them, does anyone else remember doing that? Bon Appetit!
Enjoy the cringe that this video is.
Ramblin' Lamberts 