Danish Puff Pastry Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the difference between puff pastry and Danish pastry? ›

DIFFERENCE PUFF PASTRY

First of all Danish pastries contain a high level of fat: 40%. The second difference is that Danish dough contains yeast and that isn't the case for puff pastry. This is the reason that after baking, puff pastries contain a more airy structure and a more crispy bite.

Always preheat your oven for a minimum of 15-20 minutes before baking, because Puff Pastry depends on even heat to rise and puff. Place pastries 1 inch apart. If you want a flaky thin and crispy pastry that's not very puffy, prick the unbaked Puff Pastry all over with a fork, which lets steam escape while baking.

Traditional Danish pastries

In Denmark, these world-famous sticky delights are called Vienna Bread (wienerbrød), as they were first made in Denmark in the 1840s by Austrian bakers.

In Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, the term for Danish pastry is wienerbrød (or wienerbröd), meaning "Viennese bread".

In addition, the special lamination technique makes the pastry deliciously flaky and airy. Lamination is a folding technique, where dough and margarine are alternately layered and rolled. Danish pastry consists of up to 27 layers depending on the specific type of pastry.

We are Team Egg Wash (or Cream Wash). While melted butter adds more flavor than the washes, it is less effective in look; it gives a speckled appearance to pastry.

Milk is too runny and will burn but you can add a little to your egg wash to make it a little thinner for coating. Melted butter also burns quite quickly. Egg wash is the most reliable because it coats the pastry evenly and doesn't run off.

Adding vinegar tenderizes the pastry. It inhibits gluten from forming there by making the pastry tender and flaky. I have always added a tbsp of vinegar to a beaten egg and added water to make one cup. my pastry is great the family always says how flaky it is.

As the pastry bakes water boils off as steam from the gluten in the dough layers and goes into the fat layers. As water turns into steam it expands, making large bubbles between the layers of dough. This inflates the pastry and it becomes about eight times higher.

How many layers of puff pastry do you use? ›

This expands the space between the flour layers. Ultimately, in classic puff pastry, you want to create 729 layers of folded dough. Seems like overkill, but all of those hundreds of layers are what create pâte feuilletée's ethereally light and delicate flakiness.

Puff pastry is a laminated dough that gets its signature airy puff from layers of butter, while phyllo dough is comparatively low-fat. Phyllo dough is mostly flour and water and can dry out easily. The fine sheets of pastry dough create a crispy, crackly effect when layered and baked.

The "national dish of Denmark" is stegt flæsk - pieces of pork, fried until crisp, and then served with boiled potatoes and parsley sauce.

Typical Danish pastries include a snegl, a cinnamon roll-style pastry, a spandauer, a pastry with a dab of custard cream in the middle (you probably know this as a 'Danish pastry'), and a tebirkes, a pastry with remonce in the middle and poppy seeds all over the top.

Puff pastry and phyllo dough have a lot in common: both are many-layered pastry doughs (unlike the traditional pâté brisée that we use in so many of our recipes), and both bake up with crispy, crunchy, flaky layers, but there are distinct differences.

The base dough, known as the detrempe, varies depending on the type of pastry. For example, puff pastry dough is made up of flour, water, and salt; croissant dough is prepared with flour, sugar, yeast, salt, and milk; while Danish dough includes the same ingredients as a croissant dough but adds eggs to the mix.

The trick to these easy Danish pastries

The trick to making this recipe for Fruity Cheese Danish SO simple is using frozen puff pastry. I'm not too big on making shortcuts in my recipes, but puff pastry is one I'll gladly take. It's just as good as homemade, if not better, and saves SO MUCH time.

What Is a Danish Pastry? A Danish pastry, often known as simply “a Danish”, is a layered, sweet pastry baked with Danish pastry traditions. This type of baking involves using yeast-leavened dough or puff pastry with added ingredients such as butter, eggs, milk, cream, and sugar to make the pastries richer and sweeter.