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Hi everyone, I'm Claire Saffitz. Welcome to my home kitchen. As you know, I'm a New York Times cooking contributor and so today I have a recipe in collaboration with NYT Cooking. It is a blueberry Danish tart. The recipe is free at the link below, no paywall, and it's just such like a cheerful, fun, bright recipe and the tart itself is really simple, but we're going to make a Danish dough, which is laminated. It's pretty forgiving. It's not at all like as complicated as making croissants. And the dough is so cool and versatile, but we're going to make this beautiful tart and I'm going to show you how to do it.
This tart, first of all, I love how it looks. It is so pretty. It's kind of taking the idea of a galette and like supersizing a just like a blueberry cheese Danish. But the whole thing is I think more visually impactful than even I kind of imagined because you get these like separation of layers of the dough. It's just super pretty. It serves really well. This is the kind of thing where if you have like a celebratory brunch or you're hosting people, it's just and it's like kind of thing you kind of can't stop eating. And it's really not very sweet also. Um it's just kind of like the perfect brunch dish. So for the dough, I have some all-purpose flour, one egg, a little water, kosher salt, yeast. So this is a
yeasted dough. It's a Danish dough. It's laminated. It's similar to croissants in theory, but it's softer and just I think a little easier to work with. Some granulated sugar, some milk, 14 tablespoons of butter. And then over here for the tart itself, when we're assembling, I have two cups of frozen blueberries and you can leave them frozen, no need to thaw. Powdered sugar, 8 oz of cream cheese at room temp, another egg and a lemon cuz we're going to use zest and juice and then a little bit of cornstarch to thicken our blueberry sauce, a little vanilla paste for the cheese filling and just a tiny bit of extra butter for the pan. So for special equipment, I do have a stand
mixer. It's going to be the easiest way to assemble the dough. So I have the hook. Then you'll need a 9-in tart pan with a removable bottom and a roll a rolling pin. You're going to roll it out. So the dough is very straightforward, easy ingredients. I'm going to start with my flour. I'm going to also add my salt, some sugar and then I'm also adding my yeast. So the recipe calls for a teaspoon of instant yeast. I am going to get together my liquid ingredients. I have a third of a cup of milk. This is room temp. I have a little bit of room temp water. And I have one large egg. So I'm going to combine all of that. You could beat this to make it that's all going to get mixed or it doesn't really
matter. So I'm going to start this on medium low. And I'm going to let this mix for about a minute until everything comes together around the dough hook. So the dough is now come together. So I'm just going to clear any dry spots from the sides. So we want to just continue to mix this on medium low until the dough is smooth and elastic and it'll be like a little tacky but not sticky. So after about 5 more minutes of mixing, here is our dough. It's nice and smooth. It has good elasticity to it. Elasticity meaning like nice and stretchy. And now we're going to add our butter. So I have 4 Tbsp of butter. So you can just add it in all at once and continue to mix. And this is really the last step
of assembling the dough. It's going to take about 5 minutes for the butter to fully incorporate and absorb and we're going to have this really nice smooth soft dough at the end. So, this dough has been mixing for almost 8 minutes and it looks really nice. I'm going to show it to you. So, it's going to be soft and kind of supple and slightly tacky, but it's not sticky. So, during this whole process you notice I didn't add any additional flour. Well, I want to form this into a ball and you just kind of do that by like sort of folding the dough over onto itself and stretching it over. And now we want to let this rise. So, I'm going to give it a little flour. And this dough is a lot easier to work
with when it's cold. And so, with any kind of laminated yeasted dough, like a croissant dough or a Danish dough, you have to work with the dough cold. Otherwise, it's going to continue to like rise as you're rolling. It's going to get filled with gas. It's going to become hard to work with and then you risk having an over-proofed final product. So, we're going to let this rise for 1 hour at room temp and that's to allow the yeast to kind of start to like become active and start to produce gases and then we're going to transfer it to the fridge and let it continue to rise slowly as it cools down and firms up. So, it's kind of a minimum of like a 2-hour chill in the fridge and up to 12.
Okay, so I have my pile of butter and I'm just going to start by kind of gathering up the sides of the parchment and flip it over and just start smashing. Now, you really want to use a high butter fat butter and usually that means buying something that says European or European style cuz that will have a higher fat content and that's going to make butter, generally speaking, that's more plastic, so like more bendable thin out and roll into the dough more easily. So, you really want to get these into an even layer, so they're kind of fused together. And once everything is, you know, roughly a half inch thick and you can see I have all my
pieces. Now we're going to wrap it in a very neat packet. So, I'm going to just fold the sides of the parchment over kind of like you're wrapping a present. And I want to get this into a rectangle that's about 5 by 8. Okay, that To me that's close enough and then 8 in this direction. But once you have that butter pliable and beating it is really helpful because beating it helps to make it more malleable but doesn't warm it up cuz you want it You really do want it to stay pretty cold. So, I'm kind of rolling it and forcing it to fill out the parchment paper. So, I'm going to take this side and fold this up to make my packet. Then kind of measure eight so that's a almost there. Okay, so now I have my
packet. I'm going to turn it over and let the fold it rest on the fold so that it doesn't come apart. And now I can just roll it with the rolling pin and the butter is going to fill in all those little air gaps. The most important thing, it's less about the egg the actual dimensions and it's more about getting something even and an even thickness with right angles. And it just being like overall smooth. So, now this is going to go back into the fridge and it's going to chill. It's going to cool down really fast cuz it's very thin and this is going to cool. I'm going to pull my dough out and start getting it into the dimensions that I want while this chills. So, here is my dough. Because I gave it sort of a head start
at room temp and then I threw it in the fridge, it continued kind of a nice slow cold rise as it chilled and it has been chilling for about 12 hours. So, we have it on our flour surface and I'm doing it rounded side down and I'm just going to start by flattening it with my hands. And I want to work it into a rectangular shape. So, sometimes I like will pull the on what will become the corners to try to start working it into that shape. And now I'm going to roll this out into a rectangle, and I want it to be around 11 by 9. So, as I'm rolling it out, I'm kind of working the corners out and the sides in to create that shape. And all right, so we're at 11 by 9. I'm going to grab my butter block.
I'm going to show you how to enclose it in the dough. Okay. So, I'm going to unwrap my butter. And as you can see when I put it up down on the dough, it is about the same it covers the kind of the width of the dough with like open sides. So, we're going to place this right down the center aligning the top and bottom and leaving this excess dough on the left and the right. And now we're going to lock it in. So, I'm going to take the excess dough on this on the left and right, and I'm going to fold it toward the center. And then you're just going to go ahead and pinch the ends together. So, that they meet at this midline and create the seam down the center. So, you're going to pinch all the way down to seal the dough.
And I also pinch at the top and bottom just so that no butter like squeezes out the top. And now we're going to do what's called the first turn. So, we are going to roll this out into a nice long rectangle, and I like this technique for locking in the butter cuz I already have something shaped like a rectangle. So, I'm just going to make it longer. And we're going to roll it out until it's about three times as long as it is wide. So, we want to work quickly cuz everything's cold and we want it to stay cold. So, give it a little more flour if you need. So, I'm going to roll kind of gently at first to start to lengthen it. If you see little air pockets, like I have one right there, I'm going to pop it. And after locking in the butter, I found
that with this dough, you can really get away with kind of one turn after locking it in and that's because the dough we're as we're rolling out, we're working the dough. So, we're kind of like activating the gluten network. And it's going to want to start to eventually spring back. So, with certain styles of dough, sometimes you can get away with like locking in the butter and doing two full turns. That is this whole, you know, rolling and folding process. But really here, [snorts] one is kind of your max. You can see it's starting to fight me a little bit by springing. But it rolled out nicely. I'm not getting any butter peaking through. So, this looks good. And with um with Danish dough, we're going to do three turns total. So, I'm going to do This is
just the first one. And in between, it's important to let the dough chill because it needs to rest so that the dough can relax. So, it's not going to spring back and we want the butter to get cold again. The butter staying cold is so important cuz that's what is going to maintain that separation and give you the layered effect that you want. Okay. So, I want something about 18 in long, which is my the See, that's an easy thing cuz that's my rolling pin is 18 in by 7. So, I'm like a little longer and like a tiny bit narrower, but it's fine. And then we're going to fold it like a letter. So, I'm
going to take the bottom or top third and fold it up toward the center. And if you have a lot of excess flour, go ahead and wipe that off cuz that's going to prevent the dough from kind of fusing, which you want it to. And then we're going to take the other side, fold it down. So now we have this nice It's called this is called your book. So now we've done one turn. I'm going to wrap this in plastic and get it back into the fridge, and it needs to rest for like minimum an hour. And if you can't put it in a really cold part of your fridge, like the back of the crisper drawer or somewhere toward the back, because we want it to be cold so that the dough relaxes and the butter gets solid, but also we don't want it to start to
ferment cuz we have yeast in there. So in an hour we're going to come back and do turns two and three. So the dough has actually had a little over an hour to rest after we locked in the butter and did the first turn. So now, after resting, we can do turns two and three all in one step. So here's the dough. It's really cold. It hasn't puffed up, so it's like we've controlled the fermentation from the yeast. So now we're going to roll it out. I gave it a little flour. So this step looks just like the first turn. We're going to roll it out to pretty much the same dimensions.
Do that letter fold, that let letter fold meaning that the thirds. We're going to do it twice. So inevitably, you get some rounding of the shorter sides. I'm always trying to kind of like correct for that. So same thing about 18 in long, and my rolling pin is kind of my ruler for that cuz it's an 18-in rolling pin. So I'm going to do that fold again. So this time I'll bring the top down to the center third, the bottom third up. So here's where I'll explain that orientation again. So you're going to do a 90-degree turn from the fold.
This part isn't like so crucial, but the idea is that if you were to unfold it like this, you'd open it to the left like a book. So, that's how you want it. And now we're going to repeat that same process for our third turn. Okay, so I want to keep rolling this out. And so far so good. Like I'm not having any butter poke through. It's not getting too soft. If you're getting soft squishy butter coming out of the layers, get it back in the fridge. It should It should needs to be colder. Now, as long as your dough is about three times longer than it is wide, you'll be okay. So, I want to get this I want to just go ahead and fold this and get it back in the fridge.
It's not like it's getting so warm. It's just really springing back a lot. So, I'm going to go ahead and do that same folding technique. And again, at this point the next step after like a couple hours in the fridge is to roll it into a circle circular shape. So, like this can This doesn't have to be this nice perfect square. So, I'm going to get this back into its plastic. Because turns two and three really work the dough pretty significantly, we need to let it rest. So, I want a really nice long relaxation and like chill down. So, 2 hours in the fridge before we're going to roll this out for our tart. Now that we have our Danish dough chilling and like about to be ready to use to assemble the tart, we're going to
pivot to the tart components and make our filling. So, I have 8 oz of room temp cream cheese here. To this, I'm going to add I have 2 Tbsp of confectioner's sugar. I'm also going to add 1 tsp of finely grated lemon zest. So, I have a lemon here. So, now I have my one large egg and I like the efficiency here because half of it's going to go in with the cream cheese filling and then you can save the other half cuz that's what we're going to use to egg wash the border of the tart. And I'm using paste cuz I like to see the specs in the crunches. So this part's by hand. The cream cheese is nice and soft, so this we're just going to work it with a spatula. And so once you have everything incorporated and the egg has really kind
of absorbed, I'm going to switch to the whisk. And this is going to help to work like a little bit of air into it to lighten it up and also to work out any lumps. So that's really it. It was just a little bit of whisking and now you have this really nice kind of fluffy, smooth cream cheese filling. I'm going to set this aside. And now we're going to put together our blueberry sauce \{slash\} filling. I have two cups of frozen blueberries and you don't need to thaw them. Going to add a third of a cup of confectioners sugar.
Now I'm adding 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of cornstarch. This is going to thicken it slightly. Then a pinch of salt. I need 2 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice. Also really helps to bring out the flavor. So now I want to just stir all this together and it's mostly to get the cornstarch kind of distributed. The final part is just to cook this a little bit. So I'm going to bring it over to my stove and I'm going to cook it until the blueberries have released their juices and have burst a little bit. Like it's going to simmer a little bit so the cornstarch activates and lightly thickens the whole mixture. So we're pretty prepped for tart assembly. I have my cream cheese here.
I have my blueberry sauce \{slash\} filling here. You can see that the It's like I didn't cook it down to a jam where the berries like fully lost all their texture and volume. They're just kind of softened and burst and swimming in their liquid which is slightly thickened. So this needs to cool down, so I'm going to set it over here. And the last step before I roll out my dough to assemble is just to prepare my tart pan. So I have again my 9-in tart pan. So I just have some room temp butter. I'm just going to smear it across the bottom and up the sides. So now we're ready to go. I'm going to grab my dough that's been rested, a little bench flour, my rolling pin, my
wheel cutter, and we're going to go to assembly and I got to get my oven preheated. The assembly is really kind of the easy part. Like the dough is kind of the majority of the work, but we have our blueberry topping that's chilling down in the fridge so that it kind of continues to set. And we have our cream cheese, our egg wash, our prepared pan, and just a little extra flour for rolling. So I'm going to grab the cold dough which has had a chance to rest. And now we want to roll this out. And now same kind of rolling technique. And like I said, we're going to do this into a circle. So whenever I'm rolling from a square into a circle, I like to really actually focus on the corners. I
kind of like roll at a diagonal. And that's to just kind of start this like rounding effect from the corners. And then once I see it's like getting a little thicker around the sides, I kind of push out from there and that helps to really just round things. But we're going to trim this so it's not important that you roll it into a perfect circle. So whenever I'm rolling out any kind of pastry, I like to keep it moving on the surface just to put make sure it's not sticking. And sticking is like particularly a problem with laminated dough cuz it ends up tearing the layers which you don't want. Okay.
I'm going to go ahead and trim this now. [snorts] Again, trying to get to about a 13-in diameter circle. I'm going to kind of wing it. I'm just going to sort of eyeball it and start to cut. Now there's There's important thing that's happening when you're trimming it. Not only are you making the shape even, but you're cutting and exposing the layers of the pastry from the lamination. And that's going to make this really, really cool ruffled edge on the tart. So, now I'm ready to press it into my pan. You There's a lot of ways you can transfer it. It's cold enough you can just like lift the whole thing. You could roll it onto your rolling pin. You
could fold it. But, I'm just going to kind of like lift it and put it into my pan. You want to try to center it. And we want to press it really, really firmly into the bottom, into those sides. Our filling is going to go in. It's not a huge amount of filling, but between the cream cheese layer and the blueberry layer, I feel like it's a nice proportion of filling to the rest of the crust. So, now using You can use the back of a spoon or a spatula. I'm just going to use my little mini offset. Smooth this into an even layer. And now, I mean, that's kind of it. Like for assembly, we're going to now fold the edges over, but I'm not going to like even really do anything with them.
They're just going to like naturally drape like so. And I'm not going to touch them. I'm not going to press them into the filling. They're just going to hang out there. And what happens as it bakes is like it puffs and like separates and you get such a cool effect of like this really dramatic edge. But, before we bake it, it has to sit at room temperature for a little while so that the yeast can start to like create gases so we get the puffing and the like really nice bready texture. So, we need a room temp proof now. So, this is going to hang out for 50 to 60 minutes, depending on your room temp. And we're just going to look for some nice puffing and separation in the dough.
I need a bigger piece of plastic than this. It's It's going to cut it. Our tart has been proofing for just under 50 minutes. It's like a little warm in here, so I think it's ready to go. And I'm going to show you how you can tell. I can see that there's like visible separation of the layers along that cut edge. It has puffed up, and when I poke it, I'm going to poke over here so you can see, it's going to spring back a little bit but leave a slight indentation. So, if you recall, I have half of the beaten egg cuz I put half of it into the cream cheese filling, so I reserve that. And we're going to use this and just be careful that when you're applying the egg that you're not actually getting it
on the cut sides. You only want to put it on the smooth flat part of the pastry. And that's because we don't want to fuse the layers together. I really want them to puff and separate in the oven as it bakes. Okay, so this is glazed. It's going to go into my oven. So, this is going to bake until that pastry edge is like very puffed and golden brown and that you're going to see that the filling is puffed and a little bit brown in spots in the center as well. So, like 30 to 40 minutes at 375. So, 31 minutes in the oven. Mostly it's the smell. I can smell that the pastry is like very well baked. So, I'm going to pull it out.
Look at how golden and beautiful the crust is. I'm going to give it the slightest poke so that it's going to settle down. It looks so beautiful. I love the separation of the layers. Super pretty. This just has to cool down. I just love how puffed it gets. But we have that um blueberry sauce. I'm going to pull that out. I'm also once it's cool enough to handle, I'm going to pop it out of the tart pan and then we'll serve it. It is a tiny bit warm, but it's basically cooled. So, I'm going to give it a nice powdered sugar coating along the pastry.
I'm going to get this onto a serving plate. And as I'm doing that, I'm going to slide it off of the base of the tart pan. I just love the way it looks. I think it looks so cool and like kind of unique. And now the final step before serving is just to top it with the blueberry mixture. So, this is nice and cold, so it's thickened up a little bit. I'm just going to spoon this in the center. And it's like such a beautiful color contrast. And it's [clears throat] super glossy and I think it looks so nice against the powdered sugar. And now let's cut a piece and taste. My gosh, it looks so pretty.
Such a nice slice. I love that you can see like where the filling tucks in underneath the folded pastry. I'm going to give it a little bit more blueberry sauce. My favorite thing about this is that you can kind of pick the whole thing up and eat it like a slice of pizza. Mhm. The dough is so tender and like has such a nice toastiness from baking it until it's like really golden brown. It just hits on so many levels. The base is so slightly warm and then you have the cold sauce, so it's like a temperature thing, a texture thing. You have fruity, tart and like creamy, sweet. It's just such a special dessert and like could not look prettier.
So, I really hope you check this recipe out. You can go to the link in the description below and it will take you to my NYT Cooking page where there's no paywall. You can get the recipe just by clicking and it's a great recipe because you have the Danish dough, which you could use for so many different things including this tart. So, there's like endless possibilities. We're going to bring you another recipe that I'm really excited about that uses same dough pretty soon. So, please check it out and don't forget to like and subscribe.
