Pop Tarts

By MeanJean

The store variety of pop tarts tend to be kind of bready and heavy because they have to stand up to the toaster, but these guys are light and flaky. A buttery, flaky delicious thing. And they keep for a long time in the freezer, not that they’ll last that long.

Ingredients

• 4 Cups + 4 Tablespoons all-purpose flour plus some for shaping and rolling
• 2 Teaspoon kosher salt (or 1 Teaspoon regular salt)
• 2 Teaspoon sugar
• 2 Cup (4 sticks) unsalted butter, chilled cut into cubes
• 8 Tablespoons ice water
• Strawberry Preserves

Details

Servings 16
Adapted from macheesmo.com

Preparation

Step 1

Roughly cube up your cold butter

Mix together Flour, Salt and Sugar.

Then add cubed butter into your dry ingredients. Using either a fork or your clean fingers, mush up the butter until you have everything evenly mixed.

You should have pea-sized balls of butter. It should look like a coarse meal. Then add your water and combine everything until it starts to form a ball. Try not to add too much water. You don’t want it wet by any means.

It’ll be kind of messy and barely be sticking together at this point, but turn it out onto a clean surface.

Knead the dough lightly for a minute or two until the dough comes together in a ball. Then split the dough in half, roll each half into a ball and wrap them in plastic.

Stick these in the fridge for at least an hour, but the dough would keep in the fridge for a a day or two.

When you’re ready to make the pop tarts, take out one of your dough balls and sprinkle a clean surface with some flour. Lightly roll the dough out into a large rectangle. Mine was about 16×12 inches.

Then trim off any exterior dough so you have a perfect rectangle and slice up the dough into 8 even rectangles. So in my case each rectangle was 4×6 inches.

Try not to use any preserves that have have a lot of corn syrup or stuff like that. Just real strawberry preserves are the best for this. You’ll be able to really taste whatever you fill the pop tarts with so make sure it’s something good.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and then set down eight rectangles.

Then add a heaping Tablespoon of filling right in the center of each rectangle. Be sure to leave plenty of room for sealing them off around the edges.

Next add your top half to each pop tart. Push the edges down with your fingers and try to get out as much air as possible. Then use a fork to really seal the edges off. Use the same fork (multi-use!) to poke some holes in the top of the pop tart so steam can escape while they bake.

The trick to these guys is to freeze them solid before you try to bake them. If you bake them as is, the filling will get too hot too fast and you’ll have an exploding pastry on your hands. If you freeze them though, the filling will be perfectly warm by the time the crust is cooked.

They’ll take about 2 hours to freeze solid. Then you can either cook them right away or store them for later.

Baking Them. Again, you want to go straight from freezer to 375 degree oven. Parchment paper will be your friend to make sure they don’t stick.

After 25-30 minutes, you’ll have some delicious pop tarts.

Dust with powdered sugar.