Danish Pastry -- Advance Preparation
Planning on making Danish Pastry for Thanksgiving Brunch at work. The timing will be a bit tricky, since it's in the middle of the week. So -- is it better to freeze the pastry dough and do the thaw/shape/bake thing the night before, or to actually bake the pastries and freeze them (minus any glaze), and then crisp them up in the oven?
3 Comments
Shuna L.November 14, 2014
I might offer another possibility:
Make & shape pastries raw, freeze first. Then thaw/temper and bake, and glaze the day your will eat them. Although you can skip the glaze - glazing danishes, in general, is meant to keep them shelf-stable and glowing, to tempt customers. I never really understood shellacking a crispy pastry - it seems counter intuitive to pleasure, but that just might be me overthinking it all. Also a lot of glaze out there is pretty gloopy/gloppy, so I stay away from it unless I'm making it myself.
You can always freeze what you have baked, and re-crisp in the oven before eating, but that sort of defeats the home-made pastry-ness. Danish dough is a lot of hard work. If it were me as your eater, I would rather the former than the latter. Good for you for making danishes from scratch! I commend you.
Make & shape pastries raw, freeze first. Then thaw/temper and bake, and glaze the day your will eat them. Although you can skip the glaze - glazing danishes, in general, is meant to keep them shelf-stable and glowing, to tempt customers. I never really understood shellacking a crispy pastry - it seems counter intuitive to pleasure, but that just might be me overthinking it all. Also a lot of glaze out there is pretty gloopy/gloppy, so I stay away from it unless I'm making it myself.
You can always freeze what you have baked, and re-crisp in the oven before eating, but that sort of defeats the home-made pastry-ness. Danish dough is a lot of hard work. If it were me as your eater, I would rather the former than the latter. Good for you for making danishes from scratch! I commend you.
MelusineNovember 14, 2014
Thank you very much for the third option -- that one completely escaped me. I'll also use this response as the reason for NOT making an overly-sweet powdered sugar glaze.
ktrNovember 12, 2014
I haven't frozen pastries like this before so I can't say for sure, but I would shy away from baking and then freezing them. I would either make and then freeze the dough, or make the pastries all the way up to the baking stage and then freeze them. Then just take them out of the freezer and let them thaw before baking them.
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