Pop Tarts: Dilemmas and Options

Unlike the homemade Doritos, there seems to be no shortage of others out there online who have attempted homemade Pop Tarts before. Not just a string of individual bloggers, either. Even Bon Appetit and King Arthur Flour are in on the game. There are a lot of options out there, but the King Arthur dough recipe seems to be the most common recipe.

The concern that I have with this is that in all of the photos on the various recipes, the dough looks puffy and flaky and delicious... and that is essentially the opposite of an actual Pop Tart. The store bought Pop Tarts have a crumbly crust that almost reminds me more of graham crackers than of flaky pastry. I don't know whether this is because they are mass produced, or because they're full of preservatives, or because they're never actually fresh, and I don't know if that particular type of crust is possible to recreate or not. That could very well be. It is also possible that everyone assessed the situation and thought, well, you could make it like the store bought product, but why bother?

So I'm going to start with a recipe from one of my favorite cooking blogs: The Smitten Kitchen. This recipe is adapted from the King Arthur recipe, but differs primarily when it comes to the fruit fillings - King Arthur doesn't have one listed. This fruit filling notes that you should mix it with corn starch in order to thicken it. Not doing so causes it to seep through the edges of the pastries.

I have yet to come across a recipe that purports to result in a pastry that can actually be put in an upright slot toaster. I'm sure all of these would be fine in a toaster oven, but I'm not sure whether I'm willing to potentially wreck my regular toaster trying. Another thing to note is that most of the recipes that I came across indicate that if you want to freeze these pastries, you should do so before you bake them, which kind of defeats the purpose of a pre-baked snack that you just pop into your toaster. I think I'll bake them all and freeze half to see how they handle later on. Most likely I'll reheat them in the oven, but I may also try the toaster by laying it on its side.

Initially, I'm going to follow the recipe exactly, but I'm thinking that maybe in a later batch I would swap in some whole wheat, or white whole wheat flour. I'll initially try a jam filling and a cinnamon-sugar filling (why mess with the classics, right?), but I'll think of some more flavor combinations as I go.

Well, what are we waiting for? Get to the kitchen!

Doritos: A Promise of Homemade Tortillas

I took the week off. I needed to put a presentation together for school. I had the most intense craving for lemon-flavored desserts. I bought a filing cabinet and spent an entire Sunday going through the stack of boxes and organizing the cabinet. I just couldn't fit making tortillas from scratch into my weekend.

But this weekend. I promise.

I'm going to stick with the traditional Dorito flavoring this time. For the next round I have something spectacular in mind!

Doritos: Dilemmas and Options

The way I see it, there are four options for creating these homemade Doritos:

1. Make both the tortillas and the powdered cheese from scratch
2. Make the tortillas from scratch, buy the powdered cheese
3. Make the powdered cheese from scratch, buy the tortillas
4. Buy both the tortillas and the powdered cheese

Obviously, the true spirit of the project dictates that I make everything from scratch. On looking into it, it seems like this is actually possible to make both the tortillas and the powdered cheese from scratch. I mean, obviously it is because someone, somewhere has to actually make these, but there is often quite a difference between the tools, ingredients and techniques available to commercial food producers, and what's available to you in your home. 

So first, the tortillas. I once watched a TV food show, I forget which one, where a lady makes her own tortillas. She had this round, flat press that shaped the meal into a tortilla and it was uniform in thickness and size. I obviously don't have one of these, so I rendered this task an impossibility. A little research, though, lead me to this website that has a recipe not only for homemade Doritos, but it include the recipe for the tortillas, too. It seems that you use the rolling pin to shape the tortillas, and that doesn't seem too hard. 

Now, the powdered cheese.  Apparently all it takes is about 10 hours in a dehydrator, then a spin through the food processor to turn the dried cheese into powder. And therein lies the problem. The food dehydrator.  I looked into this a bit further and, while it seems possible to use a basic oven like a dehydrator, it takes quite a bit more work and the end result isn't consistent. Some sites even recommend things like propping the oven door open and putting a fan in front of it. And running the oven for 10 hours? Count me out. 

But buying a dehydrator? I don't know. At this stage, it's sort of a level of commitment that I'm not quite prepared for. Not that I have any thing against buying additional cooking gadgets - not that at all! But a dehydrator has never even been on my list of somedays. Also, truthfully, I'm concerned about the possibility of making my own jerky, and what that would do to my world.  

So, for the time being, it looks like options 1 and 3 from the above list are off the table.  I think that, since we're at the very beginning stages of this project, I should maybe take the easy way out, just this once, and buy both the cheese, and the tortillas. If I manage to pull them off (including if I manage to find some form of powdered cheese), I'll try making the tortillas from scratch. And all the while, I will contemplate the idea of buying a food dehydrator.