Danish pastry

Danish pastry

A typical Spandauer-type Danish with apple filling and glazing
Type	Sweet bread
Place of origin	Denmark
Main ingredients	Wheat flour, butter, milk, eggs, yeast.

A Danish pastry or just Danish (especially in American English) is a multilayered, laminated sweet pastry in the viennoiserie tradition. The concept was brought to Denmark by Austrian bakers and has since developed into a Danish specialty. Like other viennoiserie pastries, such as croissants, they are a variant of puff pastry made of laminated yeast-leavened doughs, creating a layered texture.

Danish pastries were exported by immigrants to the United States, and are today popular around the world.

Danish pastry is made of yeast-leavened dough of wheat flour, milk, eggs, sugar and large amounts of butter or margarine.

A yeast dough is rolled out thinly, covered with thin slices of butter between the layers of dough, and then the dough is folded and rolled several times, creating 27 layers. If necessary, the dough is chilled between foldings to ease handling. The process of rolling, buttering, folding and chilling is repeated multiple times to create a multilayered dough that becomes airy and crispy on the outside, but also rich and buttery.

Butter is the traditional fat used in Danish pastry, but in industrial production, less expensive fats are often used, such as hydrogenated sunflower oil (known as "pastry fat" in the UK).

In Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, the term for Danish pastry is wienerbrød/wienerbröd, "Viennese bread". The same etymology is also the origin of the Finnish viineri. Danish pastry is referred to as facturas in some Spanish speaking countries. In Vienna, the Danish pastry, referring to Copenhagen, is called Kopenhagener Plunder or Dänischer Plunder.