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Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Pop-Tarts | Gourmet Makes | Bon Appétit

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Claire Saffitz takes on the toaster pastry that built a thousand childhood breakfasts.

In the August 7, 2019 episode of “Gourmet Makes,” Bon Appétit pastry chef Claire Saffitz sets out to rebuild the Kellogg’s Frosted Strawberry Pop-Tart entirely from scratch, no shortcuts allowed. The series’ whole premise is Saffitz reverse-engineering a mass-produced snack using nothing but professional pastry technique, and the Pop-Tart turns out to be one of the trickier builds she’s tackled. What starts as a dry, crumbly commercial pastry becomes a multi-day project involving laminated dough, reduced strawberry jam, and a hand-whisked royal icing.

• Saffitz dissects a real Kellogg’s Pop-Tart first, identifying its dry crumbly crust, thin gelled filling, and opaque Royal icing top as the three components she has to reverse-engineer.
• Her crust is a laminated, flaky-but-sturdy dough built from significant amounts of cold butter, flour, sugar, and salt, cut into uniform rectangles using a custom cardboard template she made herself.
• The filling is a concentrated strawberry jam cooked down from fresh strawberries, sugar, and salt specifically thick enough that it won’t burst or bleed out during baking, then topped after baking with an egg white, confectioners’ sugar, vanilla, and lemon juice icing finished with multicolored sprinkles.

Taking Apart The Original

Before she touches a mixing bowl, Saffitz cuts open a store-bought Frosted Strawberry Pop-Tart to study what she’s actually competing against. She calls out the dry, crumbly texture of the commercial crust, the thin, almost gelatinous strawberry filling running through the middle, and the hard, opaque Royal icing coating on top as the three things any homemade version has to nail. That diagnostic step matters because it sets the constraint she keeps repeating through the episode: she wants to elevate every layer without turning the finished product into a generic fruit hand pie that no longer reads as a Pop-Tart.

Building A Crust That Actually Laminates

The pastry base is where most of the episode’s trial and error lives. Saffitz develops a laminated dough loaded with cold butter, flour, sugar, and salt, chilling and rolling it repeatedly to get the flaky-yet-sturdy structure she needs, sturdy enough to hold a filling without collapsing, flaky enough to still taste like a treat rather than a pie crust. To keep her rectangles consistent across a full batch, she cuts a custom cardboard template and uses it to portion the rolled-out dough into uniform bases before filling and crimping.

A Jam Built To Survive The Oven

Rather than trying to copy the original’s thin, gelled filling directly, Saffitz cooks fresh strawberries down with sugar and salt into a thick jam engineered specifically not to burst or leak during baking, a real risk given how much moisture is packed into raw strawberries. Once the crust is filled and the edges crimped shut, the pastries go into the oven until they’re puffed and golden brown, the same visual cue anyone checking a batch of hand pies would look for.

Royal Icing, Not Frosting

The finishing touch is a crisp, opaque royal-style icing whisked together from egg white, confectioners’ sugar, vanilla, and lemon juice, the lemon juice doing the work of cutting through all that sugar with real tartness. Saffitz finishes each pastry with multicolored sprinkles before the icing sets, matching the look of the original box while giving the topping actual depth of flavor instead of straight sweetness.

Her mandate the entire episode: rebuild the Pop-Tart’s dry crust, thin filling, and Royal icing from scratch, without losing the thing that makes it a Pop-Tart in the first place.

Bon Appétit’s “Gourmet Makes” built its following on exactly this kind of process video, and the channel’s back catalog sits in the same wheel of creator-driven, watch-the-whole-thing internet content as other long-running YouTube franchises like World’s Largest Challenge! and World’s Most Dangerous Escape Room!. The Pop-Tart episode ends with Saffitz pulling a full tray of golden, iced, sprinkle-topped pastries out of the oven, flaky where the original is crumbly and tart where the original is just sweet, proof that the from-scratch version cleared the bar she set for herself at the start.