Chef Freja
Flaeskesvaer
Danish pork crackling, simmered tender, dried until parchment, then fried until it puffs and shatters. The beer snack of every Danish kro, salty and golden and made for cold pilsner and good company.
Culinary Explorer
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Butterdejs-Tarteletskaller
Created by Chef Freja
Danish puff pastry tartelet shells folded and chilled in patient layers, baked tall and golden until they shatter at the first bite. The architecture that holds a hundred different fillings.
Appetizers & Snacks
Danish
Make Ahead
Dinner Party
Special Occasion
45 min
Active Time
20 min cook•3 hr 30 min total
Yield12 shells
Tarteletter belong to the Danish dinner party. Not the casual weeknight kind, the kind where the table is set the day before, candles are lit before anyone sits down, and someone in the kitchen has been folding pastry since morning. They are the dish that begins the meal at confirmations, christenings, and the long Sunday lunches that mark the Danish year. By the time the asparagus comes up in May, every Danish home cook starts thinking about tarteletter again.
The filling is the cook's choice. Hons i asparges, chicken in asparagus cream, is the classic, but I've eaten them filled with shrimp in dill cream, smoked salmon, mushrooms in sherry, asparagus alone when the season is at its peak. The shells are the architecture. They are what holds everything else up, and they are what we're making here.
Butterdejs is puff pastry, and there's no shortcut worth taking. You make a base dough, you encase a block of cold butter, you roll and fold and chill and roll and fold and chill again until the dough holds hundreds of paper-thin layers of butter and flour, alternating like the pages of a book. When the heat hits them in the oven, the water in the butter turns to steam, the layers separate, and the shell rises tall and hollow. That's it. That's the whole trick. The joy of waiting is built into every step, because every fold needs the rest that follows it.
Pay attention to one thing above all else: temperature. The butter and the dough must stay cold and equal in firmness through every fold. Warm butter tears and disappears into the flour, and your shells will rise crooked or not at all. Cold butter, cold dough, cold counter, cold patience. You'll know it's right when you cut one open and see the layers stacked like the rings of a tree.
Tarteletter arrived in Denmark in the 19th century with the wave of French culinary influence that reshaped the Danish bourgeois table, alongside roasts, sauces, and the formal multi-course meal. By the early 1900s they had become a fixture of the Danish festkost, the food of celebration, and the filling of hons i asparges with imported white asparagus from France was considered the height of refinement. After the Second World War, when Danish white asparagus from Samso and Lammefjorden became more widely available, tarteletter moved firmly into the home kitchen and onto the menus of the lunch restaurants of Copenhagen. They remain one of the few Danish dishes that almost everyone agrees belongs on the table at a confirmation, and the pastry shells themselves have outlasted countless changes in fashion because nothing else does the same job.
The technique, the tradition, and the story behind every dish.
Discover Culinary ExplorerIngredients
plain flour
Quantity
250g, plus extra for dusting
fine sea salt
Quantity
1 teaspoon
unsalted butter (for the detrempe)
Quantity
25g
cold and cubed
ice-cold water
Quantity
125ml
white wine vinegar
Quantity
1 teaspoon
unsalted butter (for the butter block)
Quantity
200g
cold, high-fat European style if you can find it
egg yolk
Quantity
1
beaten with 1 teaspoon water, for glazing
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| plain flour | 250g, plus extra for dusting |
| fine sea salt | 1 teaspoon |
| unsalted butter (for the detrempe)cold and cubed | 25g |
| ice-cold water | 125ml |
| white wine vinegar | 1 teaspoon |
| unsalted butter (for the butter block)cold, high-fat European style if you can find it | 200g |
| egg yolkbeaten with 1 teaspoon water, for glazing | 1 |
Equipment Needed
- •Rolling pin
- •9cm fluted round cutter
- •5cm fluted round cutter
- •Two baking sheets
- •Sharp knife
- •Pastry brush
- •Bench scraper
- •Wire cooling rack
Instructions
- 1
Make the detrempe
Whisk the flour and salt together in a bowl. Rub in the 25g of cold cubed butter with your fingertips until it disappears into the flour. This small amount of butter in the base dough is the trick that makes the detrempe pliable enough to fold without tearing. Mix the vinegar into the cold water, then pour it into the bowl and bring everything together with a butter knife. The vinegar weakens the gluten just enough to keep the dough relaxed through every fold. Tip onto the counter and gather into a rough square. Don't knead it. You want shaggy, not smooth.
Score a deep cross on top of the square with a sharp knife. This relaxes the gluten as the dough rests and stops it from springing back when you start to roll. - 2
Rest and shape the butter
Wrap the detrempe in baking paper and chill it for thirty minutes. Meanwhile, place the 200g of cold butter between two sheets of baking paper and beat it with a rolling pin until it softens slightly, then shape it into a flat square about 15cm across. The butter needs to be cold but pliable, the same texture as the dough. If one is harder than the other, the butter will tear through and the layers will collapse. Chill the butter block until firm but still bendable, about ten minutes.
- 3
Encase the butter
Roll the rested detrempe into a square about twice the size of your butter block, with the corners thinner than the middle. Place the butter in the centre, rotated 45 degrees so its corners point to the middles of the dough sides. Fold the four flaps of dough over the butter like an envelope, sealing the edges so no butter peeks out. You now have a parcel of dough enclosing a perfect square of cold butter. This is called the lock-in, and it's the foundation of every layer that follows.
- 4
First two folds
Lightly flour the counter and roll the parcel into a long rectangle about 50cm by 20cm. Roll firmly and in one direction only, away from you. Brush off any loose flour. Fold the rectangle in three like a letter: bottom third up, top third down. That's one single turn. Rotate the dough 90 degrees so the open seam is on your right, like a book waiting to be opened. Roll out and fold again the same way. Two single turns done. Wrap and chill for thirty minutes.
If you see streaks of butter breaking through the dough at any point, dust them with flour and put the whole thing back in the fridge immediately. Warm butter is the enemy of layers. - 5
Final two folds
Take the chilled dough out, place it seam-side right, and repeat: roll into a long rectangle, fold in three, rotate, roll, fold in three again. Four single turns total. Each fold triples the layers and the cold rest between them is what gives the puff its strength. By now the dough should feel cool and elastic, with faint marbling visible through the surface. Wrap it tightly and chill for at least an hour, or overnight. The longer rest is the better one.
- 6
Cut the shells
Roll the rested dough out to a thickness of about 4mm, no thinner. Cut twelve large rounds with a 9cm fluted cutter. From half of these, cut a smaller 5cm round from the centre to make rings. You should now have six solid bases and six rings. Stack one ring on top of each solid base, pressing very gently at the edge to seal them without crushing the layers. The ring becomes the wall, the base becomes the floor, and the layers will rise into the cup shape as they bake. Place the assembled shells on a parchment-lined tray and chill for twenty minutes. Cold dough rises straighter than warm dough.
- 7
Glaze and bake
Heat the oven to 220C. Brush the tops of the rings with the egg yolk wash, but be careful not to let it drip down the cut sides. Egg wash on the cut layers seals them shut and the shells rise crooked or not at all. Bake for fifteen minutes at 220C, then lower the heat to 190C and bake for another five to eight minutes until the shells are deep gold all the way down their sides and feel weightless when you lift one. Cool on a wire rack. You'll know they're right when you tap one and it sounds hollow.
If the centres puff up too much during baking, press them down very gently with the back of a spoon as soon as they come out of the oven. The hollow is what holds the filling.
Chef Tips
- •Use the best butter you can find. High-fat European butter, 82% or higher, has less water and gives you cleaner layers. Danish or French cultured butter is ideal. Supermarket butter works, but the shells will be slightly less dramatic.
- •Make the dough the day before you want to bake. An overnight rest in the fridge gives the gluten time to relax completely and the butter time to firm evenly through the layers. The shells will rise taller and straighter.
- •Baked shells freeze beautifully. Cool them completely, then freeze in a single layer before transferring to a bag. Reheat from frozen at 180C for five minutes and they come back almost as good as fresh.
- •When you serve them, fill the shells at the very last moment. Hot filling in a cold shell makes the layers go soft within minutes, and the whole point of butterdejs is the shatter.
- •Save the small rounds you cut from the centres. Bake them alongside the shells with a brush of egg wash and a scatter of pearl sugar, and you have small palmier-style biscuits to serve with afternoon coffee.
Advance Preparation
- •The puff pastry can be made up to two days ahead and kept tightly wrapped in the fridge. It also freezes well for up to a month; defrost in the fridge overnight before rolling.
- •The cut and assembled shells can be frozen raw on a tray, then transferred to a bag. Bake from frozen, adding two or three minutes to the baking time.
- •Baked shells keep at room temperature in an airtight tin for two days, or freeze for up to a month. Refresh in a hot oven for a few minutes before filling to bring back the crispness.
Frequently Asked Questions
Nutrition Information
1 serving (about 45g)
Calories
215 calories
Total Fat
16 g
Saturated Fat
10 g
Trans Fat
0 g
Unsaturated Fat
5 g
Cholesterol
60 mg
Sodium
195 mg
Total Carbohydrates
16 g
Dietary Fiber
1 g
Sugars
0 g
Protein
3 g
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