Making The Classic Danish Pastry, Spandauer | Recipe and Steps

Hello and welcome, my name is Benjamin Biek and today we will show you how to make one of the most traditional pieces of Danish

pastry

. It's time to move on and, as you can imagine, it's not a Danish thing it's named after. prison in Germany, but I'll come back to that and show you why it makes sense when when we made the spandau, we baked it and we finished it, we tried to take it using the other products trying to take it to another level and we've tried to adjust some of the flavors that We thought maybe they were too sweet for our taste, so we added a little lemon syrup and some herbs to give it more aromas.

We will get to mix the dough. We need to do this a couple of hours in advance before we start laminating and laminating the dough with the butter, so what I prepared is I have a little bit of everything. purpose wheat flour here we put it in the freezer there overnight so that all the ingredients and the dough when mixed is as cold as possible it is very important to keep it cold because if you have a dough that is too hot all the butter will be absorbed because the butter It will melt and go into the dough.

I have some garlic cream here, we use it to give it a little more mouthfeel but also to give a little bit softer crunch to our

danish

and all of our dough, and I also get a lot of umami from the animal fat that's in it. inside the cream, so now just mix all the ingredients. Of course, I'm going to start with the wet ingredients with water, we got our cream, the whole leg, we take our yeast and the sourdough and then we're going to add the flour and then we're going to mix in the salt and the sugar, so we want to have the machine at the highest speed. as low as possible so as not to heat the dough, this is very important because if the dough gets hot then the butter will get hot and then the butter will be absorbed by the dough and the whole sowing process will be a failure, so now that the dough is finished in the blender, let's take out what we are doing.

Now we are preparing for the next step, which is the first four and, in fact, also the last 16 layers of butter that we are going to make, so this will go in the refrigerator so that the gluten in the dough can relax. . When we stretch it, it does not retract and pulls the layers in the dough part, we film it and then we take this piece of butter, it does not come in this beer format, but it is 500 grams of butter. just push it down gently with your hands, fold the sides of the parchment paper and then use a rolling pin to get a nice even piece and this goes in the fridge along with the dough so we keep everything together.

We are going to start our cream with bringing a little cornstarch, some egg yolks and the other part that we are going to boil, we add our cream, this will give a very beautiful texture and a lot of umami to this cream and we have a little sugar of whole milk and then we use these very rich and thick vanillas, this is support or vanilla, we add it and then we also use lemon zest, of course, it brings a lot of freshness and acidity to something that is usually very sweet and very fatty. so we stir it in, then we just turn it on and bring it to a boil.

Now our cream, milk, sugar, lemon zest and vanilla are starting to simmer and what you want to do here when you're working with your custard is using a spatula instead of a whisk and you don't need a galloping boil where it's made. foam all over, just a few bubbles are needed, as you can see, and from time to time pour over the cornstarch, keep on low heat. We're just going to mix it up a little bit here, I'm going to bring it back in so the high stability of the cream here really helps you through the process.

You don't want the cream to separate, but you do. to bring it to a boil now and you want it really thick and creamy because you don't want the cream to be here, you don't want it to run out when you're

making

and baking, you spend hours, you really want it. stay where it is, but I always leave a little bit of milk just to make sure that when we put the cream back in the pot just to make sure it doesn't burn, now that our cream is nice and thick, we take a spatula and then we put it in a metal tray so that, as it cools, it thickens.

You can tend to make a kind of shell on top, so we used some plastic wrap and you can just bring the plastic wrap. film until you get to the custard so we're just going to put this in the refrigerator and when it's cold we're going to put it in a piping bag and then it's ready to fill hours so now We're ready to make the proper sheet of the dough. We left it in the refrigerator for about an hour, but you can leave it there overnight if you want, it will develop even more flavor, so we'll take it out along with that we got our olive butter, make sure it sticks to the dough, there's no fat in this dough, so the chance of the butter, if we keep the dough cold, the chance of the butter getting incorporated into the dough is actually very small.

What I want to make sure is that you are in the direction you are rolling. You should have both sides open. If you see this side, it is also open, but the other side here is closed. If you imagine that I roll in this direction. I'm going to stretch this little piece of dough too much and it will break, be careful where the butter is, you don't want the dough to come out too much, then we'll end up with pieces that have nothing on them. butter here, the aloe vera butter really shows what it's capable of because we can really stretch this butter, even though it's very cold, so you can take it right out of the refrigerator and start working with it.

If you want to reduce it to about four millimeters before you make the first folds, so now we have a layer of butter, you can imagine, now we fold it in half, which means that here we have two layers of butter, we do the same on the other side and then just flip it one more time so we take our cube of butter and the other professional butter will give us a very creamy texture but also one that will stay inside the baked goods during baking which is very important, aloe butter is very elastic. and if it's not going to melt easily, now we repeat the rolling of the four layers, so now we have four by four, so flour it a little, we're going to measure it at 52 by 42 centimeters, so I'll roll it out again, just check everything the time, if it's okay and even because we've been stretching and working with the dough, if we cut it now it has a tendency to retract, so I'm going to leave it here for five minutes so we're ready to shape our dough, the first thing What we are going to do is trim the edges so that there are nice, sharp squares and since the dough has rested, it does not retract, so those five minutes on the table do their magic.

Now we have to cut them into four by four by ten for this

recipe

and we're just going to take our iron here and We're just going to roll it all the way up, this is 10 by 10 centimeters. Now we're ready to make the

spandauer

shape and I'm going to show you that, so now we have our squares here next. The next thing we're going to do is use our monks, so we're going to use just a tablespoon of remongs, we're going to use it as glue, as I mentioned before, the spending hour is not like that.

It's not a Danish word, it's a cake that's actually named after a German prison in Berlin that was very infamous in the 19th century and then it had like a group of inmates in the middle and that infamous prison kind of gave it its name. to this cake, so what we have to do now is just bring each corner to the middle, it's very simple, grab it like this, then you have your four towers here, you see the comments, it works like glue on this one. dough, you can also see the flexibility here of the other butter probe when we stretch it, it doesn't break the dough when it rises and after baking we will see all this beautiful rolling work if we do it correctly, so there you see it.

Now you have them, you can push them down a little bit or you can also do it after they have risen, so we put them on a metal tray here, we are going to cover them with plastic wrap, we let them grow to double their size, so now our spending hour is over. it went up to double the size and we're just going to take our fingers and push down where we're going to keep all of our custard, so now that they're almost ready to go in the oven, we're going to take our beaten egg. just make sure you coat all the sides to give them shine, but also because we want to give the dough a little bit of give and we do that by adding a little bit of moisture, so we set the oven to 200 degrees.

I'll just place them there and leave them there for about 20 minutes. I'll check them after 18 minutes, so now that the 20 minutes are up, our hours of use are in the oven when they come straight out of the oven that we want. drizzle with a little bit of our lemon pepper syrup, but first we want to check that it's crispy and then we take our syrup. What you're hearing here is that the syrup starts to boil when it meets the butter, always a good thing. Firm When you are

making

Danish bread or anything that has a lot of butter in it, if you have done the rolling correctly and are proofing correctly, there will be no butter to smear on the baking sheet from all the little gas bubbles. that have formed during fermentation are going to be kept in all the butter so that you can fry the dough from the inside there you have it, it's our modern version of the traditional pass the time.