funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund we'll be making a moist flaky recipe for filled Danish pastry that is anything but traditional and remembering a day on the set cooking with Julia today on welcome to my kitchen I'm Bo Joe Kangas cookbook author food writer columnist wife mother and grandmother I've spent my life learning about food and sharing my knowledge with others it's given me a certain perspective on cooking rooted in the flavors traditions and rhythms of life in northern Minnesota and a passion for sharing what I know welcome to my kitchen my mother-in-law dicks mother was visiting and she had answered the phone and it's hello this is Julia Child you know he's Beatrice there and and she got so excited when I came home she ran to the she's a julia child called give me a cup she called and asked for you and she sounded just like she does on TV oh you got the biggest bang out of that and so she called she asked if I would I would like to come on her show and show her some wonderful Scandinavian baking I said would i oh man would I of course I would so it was all set up and I I flew out to Cambridge in Boston or next to Boston and that's where her her house was and did some baking with her out of the scandinavian baking book she was so fun if you've seen any of her her shows she's there poking her finger into the bowl and acting like as if she's never cooked a thing in her life which is not true on the way out there I thought oh my gosh what can I tell Julia about anything because she as far as I was concerned she knew everything welcome you know this is the recipe that I did with Julia Child and that's why I think it's kind of fun to share the whole recipe with you this is one of the recipes actually it's the quick Danish pastry and I had to explain that Danish pastry is normally made with another kind of method but this one is quick and I learned it in Denmark actually this is what they're doing Oliver you know in Denmark and in Europe because it's so much quicker so we start out by dissolving package of yeast in a quarter of a cup of warm water and we'll let that heat up warm up and we're going to add a cup full of a half a cup of milk that's at room temperature and we're going to add one egg room temperature and a quarter of a cup of sugar in a teaspoon of salt and that's a very very very simple simple liquid now the thing that about the liquid for Danish pastry is that there's yeast in it otherwise we it's very similar to the way that you might make just a puff pastry or a pastry for pie so here we go we'll set this aside and it will just foam up a little bit it takes a few minutes it'll form up and in the meantime I'm going to cut two sticks of unsalted butter into pieces and they will go into the food processor with a cup and a half two and a half cups of flour all-purpose flour this looks like a lot of butter but that's the way pastries danish pastry is very rich and we're going to we're doing this this would normally be the butter would normally be rolled out in one big flat hunk and then you fold and roll it into into the yeast dough okay but I'm going to use the food processor so we're putting the two cups and a half cup of flour into the food processor and then just will drop the unsalted butter in and I'm using unsalted butter here because the unsalted butter does give us a slightly different texture and it makes it really good will pulse it about eight times until the butter pieces are both no bigger than half an inch we have our yeast yeast mixture which is the liquid that will go into the food into the pastry and we're just going to dump all of the flour and butter into the bowl then we'll take a spatula and just turn the dole the mixture over on itself and you just keep doing this until there's no more flour visible in the in the mixture but you don't want to make it mixed it we're really really hard or you'll end up making cookie dough and we don't want to do that and as we're doing this we begin to see the butter pieces in the dough and that's good we're going to put this in the refrigerator and you let it sit there like overnight in order to get the whole dough what happens is that the yeast will kind of lip dough rise and the butter will stay nice and cold because we're going to flatten all those out to make this nice flaky pastry now here's a dough that I need yesterday and it's ready to be rolled out and folded you can see this is what it looks like it did look a whole lot different then when I put it into the refrigerator but it's the yeast in there is working okay so now we're going to take it out and it's quite stiff and I want to spread some flour onto my work board the work surface and we'll turn the dough out you see that a little bit that didn't get mixed in and now I'll dust the whole thing with flour and with my hands kind of pound it into kind of a squarish shape it's kind of fun to do actually get little kids doing this to help you because it really is a very easy way to make Danish pastry so this is this is where we do the rolling and the folding to get you to get the layers in the door you can see if you look close up there's pieces of butter in here and the butter pieces are what we're going to be flattening out when we when we roll the door there are two different kinds of rolling pins there are those that are the Balmore ball bearing rolling out type I can use either one but the French prefer this kind that's just a without handles and so either way I think it's fine but if you happen to have one of these issues it what's kind of nice is that it's kind of massaged as your hands as you're rolling out the door and if you find a sticky spot it's okay simply to to powder it with a little bit of flour okay turn this around and I'm gonna dust it lightly and then we roll it out again this door handles very easily because it's cold but there will be wet spots and that's okay and I see one right there okay we roll it up too as bigger squares you can possibly make now in the recipe I've got inches in everything all like all designated but that's because editors always want to know how big do you want okay I'm gonna to get this control you can see already you can see where the butter pieces are in there so we'll fold it over on itself and this is different from the regular puff pastry method because where we're rolling the dough and you fold it into like a business letter a little bit sticky on the bottom fold it again and this has a few little places where it likes to stick with that's okay you just use your flower sprinkler and then we'll roll it out again and we'll roll it and fold it as many times as you have the time and energy to do and it is at least four times that way we're developing the flakiness okay now again fold it over like a business letter and it's beginning to be very controlled control of all and a scraper like this is really essential you don't have one go and find one because they are very there's lots and lots of uses for a bench scraper is what it's called and every time we do this rolling and folding you're flattening out those butter pieces so that we end up with a flaky pastry if at any point when you're doing this the dough gets so sticky you can't handle it then just put it in the refrigerator and let it chill out and take it out again and continue to you're rolling and folding actually the more you roll and fold the dough the better the pastry is going to be as long as you can still continue to see these little flattened pieces of butter in there and at this point we can wrap it up and put it in the refrigerator for the final rolling see what a neat little pile of dough that is compared to the way it looked when I first took it out and this will go now into the refrigerator and you can keep this for up to four days before you roll it out although you can actually put this into the freezer and let it thaw out later and you have it out with all ready when you want to make some pastry and the great Scandinavian baking book is one that I did a lot of research in the Scandinavian countries to write because that was my first book was that way - in the Finnish cookbook all of the inspiration everything that I have in there it came from the old country and I did the same with a Scandinavian baking book and we went up into a northern part of Sweden and then down the length of Norway that was great fun and then into into Denmark and in Denmark we discovered that the where you I was looking for the traditional foods the traditional foods of the of the area found that the traditional foods were not served in the restaurant the fancy restaurants but rather in the ins and the byways and not in the evening so much as at noon so I'd get these very traditional foods from Denmark and Norway and Sweden we didn't eat them at noon in the evening we just kind of you know we didn't really have big meals so that that was a that was kind of a huge discovery well now for the fillings and I have like one basic method for several different fillings and it just depends on what you can get on what you have on hand I am going to make an apricot filling a prune filling and then I have an almond filling that I've already got done so we take one cup of approves if I can get them out of here get a truants of course and a cup of sugar that goes over the top and I need a cup of water in a cup of water goes right over now when you're making the apricot filling it's exactly the same thing you I use dried apricots a cup of dried apricots a cup of sugar and a cup of water and then we're going to cover it we're going to put that into the microwave stir it up and put it in the microwave and this takes about 10 minutes high-power for 10 minutes our prunes are cooked and this is what they look like we'll close that and we're going to put these into the food processor and puree the up ruins to make the proven filling and that looks good but this is the consistency we're looking for and you can make apricot filling in exactly the same manner just put the apricots water and and sugar into the microwave the microwave for 10 minutes and you've got your filling my almond filling I just softened almond paste that I got in the in the grocery store and it just softened it and and put that just mixed it up with some butter and an egg white and and I think that needs a little bit more liquid so we're gonna add a little liquid to that but we want it just to be like almost like soft butter so we can spread it into the pastry so this was in the refrigerator overnight actually was only in the refrigerator for a couple of hours and again I'm going to dust my work surface with flour so that it doesn't stick and I'll dust a little bit of flour on top of the pastry and you can see how lovely the little pieces of butter look in there and we're going to pound it out to get it started it knows when when I pound it out it'll know that I'm going to try and roll it out so that will get it to get the pastry loosened up and then we're gonna roll this out till about a quarter of an inch and keep it as square as possible we're going to roll this out to approximately 16 inch or 18 inch square that happens a lot when you're when you're working with a yeast dough it'll it won't you roll it out so far and then it won't go any further and the reason you won't go any further is that it needs to relax so we need to let the dough relax the James Beard Award was really basically for the collective work that I had done and but they they stamped a Scandinavian baking book with thee with a James Beard Award so you see that on the cover of every one of the books he fly to New York and you go to the I forget the name of the the big center where this was there were thousands of people there and I was really not sure how I should dress what I should wear I put on a pair of high heels and then discovered that I had to go up and get the award I had to climb up three or four stairs and I thought oh my gosh you know when you're nervous it's really hard to walk on high heels and I hadn't done much of that and because my feet are so big they never really they never really made high-heeled shoes big enough for me it was a great affair I was totally honored and and it was all kind of a big blur at the end and I'm going to do a couple of different things one is going to be the the braid the Danish bit braid that's really kind of fun to do and then I'll show you a few other shapes that we want to want to point out okay let's take the dough and cut it into a six inch roughly six inch strip this little corner here is like likes to be a little bit on the website okay now we will shape this into a braid believe it or not we're gonna spread the first almond filling right down the middle spread some apricot filling in the middle I like the combination of apricot and almond makes a good flavor now what we're going to do is cut make cuts right down the side of this one and I have to try and be about equal on both sides but sometimes that doesn't work out then we start with the top and we fold it over like so fold it one first one side than the other oops see I got a little bit uneven there you almost don't ever notice it you get it nice and straight and it'll put it on the cookie sheet and it has to rise for a few minutes until it's about doubled now let's do a couple of other shapes and I'll just make like one of each for instance these are our favorite ooh and filling that we like at Christmas time Christmas stars we just put a little bit of pruning filling in here maybe a little bit of the apricot I mean that the almond filling would taste good to let the prune star and then to make the star you pick up one corner always be on the I always use the same corner and there we have the star you can make us make them as big as you want or as small as you want now another thing we can do is fill the fill a square with apricot killing and again I'm gonna go with it good on it almond filling and that is one that we often see now let's make that into bear claw and the bear claw shape is made like this and we pick it up and spread it out so how is that then there are other shapes that are popular one that is kind of fun it's called the packet and it's shaped like that with the filling on the inside see the Danes are really smart because they use the same dough in many different fillings and it seems to taste different when it's in a different shape okay this one is called the spanned hour so we put the going you know this would be really good with raspberry filling and they go just from like in toward the center these will rise for maybe half an hour and they go into a 350 degree oven for approximately 20 minutes well our Danish pastries have risen they might not look like they've risen very much but they have risen I'm going to brush them with a little bit of egg wash and then sprinkle them with some pearl sugar and they'll go into the oven you can tell that this one has risen a little bit longer than the other one but we're just going to touch it we don't want to varnish it with with egg wash but we want to just touch it up so that we have some shiny spot and then on the other one too and I spend hours looking good and our packets looking good and their stars are looking good then we'll sprinkle them with a little bit of the Swedish pearl sugar which always makes it look a little bit festive okay now we go into the oven 375 for approximately and I've got the conviction of and on so I can put both both pans in at the same time this will take about 15 minutes here they are baked and out of the oven well you could see the flakiness of the dough right there pick this up it's still hot but the dough is flaky you can see how it pulls apart it's all that rolling and folding that makes the difference and that's what we want I love it see you next time when we'll be preparing delicious soups paired with perfect breads mine be odjick Angus welcome to my kitchen you you funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund