38 Pastry Recipes From Around The World That You Can Make At Home

Delish

Thu, September 22, 2022 at 2:00 PM UTC

38 Pastry Recipes From Around The World That You Can Make At Home — If you’re like us, you’ve got a favorite local coffee shop or cafe, where the atmosphere is welcoming, the coffee is always great, and the pastries… oh, the pastries! While simple, classic options like banana bread or peanut butter cookies are staples, what we really get excited for are the mysteriously buttery and flaky options full of unexpected and unfathomable flavors and textures. We’re here to tell you, should you be up for the challenge, they’re totally achievable at home. In fact, with a little patience and creativity, you can make a variety of these sweet desserts from around the world, right in your own kitchen. Check out our 38 pastry recipes for ideas—you might just discover some new favorites among them.
Pretty much anywhere you could travel to will have their own variety of region-specific pastries that they’ve been known for for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. French pastries are some of the most well-known, and we’ve got recipes for all the classics here. Well-laminated dough (meaning it has had butter folded into it several times) is a lengthy, multi-day process, so we’ve admittedly taken some shortcuts to make some of them more achievable at home. Check out our shortcut croissants, macarons, madeleines, beignets, and profiteroles. Looking to expand your pastry knowledge? Try our Middle Eastern ma’amoul cookies, our Italian zeppole, our Jewish sufganiyot, our Mexican concha, our Japanese mochi, or our Chinese mooncakes. Remember—pastry chefs can take *years* to master these recipes, so if yours don’t turn out perfectly the first time, don’t stress! Pastries are as much about the process as they are about the end result, so enjoy the journey.
And don’t think it’s just sweets. Traditional pastry methods can translate to some very tasty savory options too, like Indian samosas, Turkish borek-inspired scrunch bread, Jewish potato knish, Greek spanakopita, and Chinese baozi (steamed buns). The great thing about these recipes is that once you’ve got their basic concept down, you can get as creative as you like with the fillings.
Want more dessert inspiration? Check out our favorite cookie recipes, our favorite pies, and our top dessert bars too.
Andrew bui

There's really no such thing as a quick croissant, but this recipe is about as fast as they come. The dough is basically a borrowed pie crust technique, cutting large chunks of cold butter into flour and skipping the intimidating traditional laminating process.
Get the **Fast(er) Homemade Croissants recipe**.
Andrew Bui

We almost never order Indian food without getting some samosas along with it, and good news: They aren't hard to make at home! The spiced potato filling is quick and easy, and the dough comes together fast using melted ghee. The crust is sturdy, but still fries up extra crisp and shatter-y. ??
Get the **Homemade Samosas recipe**.
Joel Goldberg

A danish is a type of laminated dough—in other words, dough that has had butter folded into it several times—but to help make the process a little more straightforward, we borrow from our croissant recipe, which relies on a “rough” puff pastry. These have warm, buttery, flaky layers and a just-sweet-enough cream cheese filling that make the effort SO worth it.
Get the **Cheese Danish recipe**.
PHOTO: ANDREW BUI; FOOD STYLING: MAKINZE GORE

Spanakopita is a popular savory Greek spinach pie frequently served as cut pieces from a whole slab pie, but we made individual pockets to save you the waiting time between baking, cooling, then slicing. As soon as they pop out of the oven, they're ready to be plated and devoured by your hungry guests, no knives necessary.
Get the **Spanakopita Spinach Pies recipe**.
Parker Feierbach

Say *ciao* to your new favorite Italian treats, zeppole! (Fun fact: One donut is called a zeppola, while zeppole is plural.) These tiny donuts are fried until perfectly golden brown, then tossed in an orange sugar (or powdered sugar, if you prefer).
Get the **Zeppole recipe**.
PHOTO: ANDREW BUI; FOOD STYLING: ERIKA JOYCE

Sticky and rich, baklava is a Turkish and Greek dessert made of layered sheets of phyllo dough, nuts, spices, sugar, and/or honey. Our version uses walnuts and pistachios, but feel free to use whichever nuts you like the most.
Get the **Walnut and Pistachio Baklava recipe**.
JOEL GOLDBERG

This lightly fried, gorgeous Jewish pastry serves as a reminder that life *can* be sweet sometimes—which is exactly why we make it exclusively for the most festive of Jewish holidays. You can really fill the donuts with whatever filling makes you happy...as long as it's sweet.
Get the **Sufganiyot (Jelly Donuts) recipe**.
Emily hlavac green

Madeleines are French butter cakes that can carry whatever flavoring you add to them. This recipe uses browned butter and almond extract for extra nuttiness with orange zest instead of the traditional lemon zest to add a pop of brightness and color.
Get the **French Madeleines recipe**.
PHOTO: ANDREW BUI; FOOD STYLING: DREW AICHELE

This tomato galette uses an herb-speckled, savory pie crust and is topped with ripe heirloom tomatoes and fresh ricotta for an extremely easy yet impressive looking dish. Serve it for a light summer dinner or as an appetizer at your next outdoor party.
Get the **Tomato Galette recipe**.
PHOTO: ANDREW BUI; FOOD STYLING: ERIKA JOYCE

Conchas are a traditional Mexican pastry with a chocolate- or vanilla-flavored seashell design. These pan dulce (meaning sweet bread in Spanish) is kind of like the brioche of Mexico.
Get the **Concha Bread recipe**.
PHOTO: LUCY SCHAEFFER PHOTOGRAPHY; FOOD STYLING: TAYLOR ANN SPENCER

Mochi is a sweet, chewy rice pastry that hails from Japan. Traditionally made from cooked and pounded rice, mochi are also easily made with rice flour. Here, each ball is filled with a sweet red bean paste, but you're just as likely to see ice cream, a matcha green tea filling, or black sesame paste inside mochi.
Get the **Mochi recipe**.
PHOTO: ANDREW BUI; FOOD STYLING: BROOKE CAISON

Brought to the city by Eastern European (mostly Ashkenazi Jewish) immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, knishes quickly rose in popularity among working class New Yorkers. These hearty pastries—mashed potatoes, studded with bits of caramelized onion, enveloped in a thin crust—accomplished three things very well. They were delicious, they were filling, and they were extremely cheap. Now you can make them at home!
Get the **Potato Knishes recipe**.
Yossy Arefi

This Turkish *borek*-inspired recipe gets its name from "scrunched"-up layers of phyllo and a spanakopita-esque filling that result in a stunning, pleated spiral shape. Fresh dill, feta, and spinach make it a grand slam you can enjoy any time of day.
Get the **Scrunch Bread recipe**.
PHOTO: LUCY SCHAEFFER; FOOD STYLING: LENA ABRAHAM

Ma’amoul cookies are a type of Middle Eastern pastry that are usually filled with a variety of dried fruits or nuts. Made with semolina flour, the shortbread-like exterior has a slight crunch to it, giving way to a softer filling. While these are especially popular during the holidays, they can be enjoyed all year round.
Get the **Ma'amoul recipe**.
PHOTO: ERIK BERNSTEIN; FOOD STYLING: MAKINZE GORE

This filling is loosely based on a very traditional Mexican (top-secret!) recipe. It’s delicious as is, but if you want to give it even more pizzaz, we highly recommend adding a splash of red wine vinegar, finely chopped capers and green olives, and a good squeeze yellow mustard. Once you've got the pastry down, you can pretty much stuff them with anything!
Get the **Cheesy Beef Empanadas recipe**.
PARKER FEIERBACH

These delicate French pastries are somehow simultaneously crispy, chewy, soft, and light as air. This makes them the perfect blank canvas for creative flavors and colors. Make sure all your ingredients are room temperature to achieve the greatest success.
Get the **Easy French Macarons recipe**.
Parker Feierbach

While king cake is made of a yeasted dough rolled with a cinnamon sugar filling, galette de rois is made of puff pastry sheets filled with almond frangipane and jam. Prior to baking, the puff pastry is scored and egg washed, giving the final pastry a beautiful golden hue.
Get the **Galette De Rois recipe**.
Andrew bui

This classic tart construction relies on fruit being laid over caramel, then topped with puff pastry. The caramel might be a little tricky, but we promise going low and slow and resisting the urge to stir is the way to make sure that you have the perfect caramelized bottom.
Get the **Tarte Tatin recipe**.
Joel Goldberg

The mascarpone filling is light, slightly tart, and just sweet enough to pair well with the apricot preserve-glazed fruit of your choice. Bonus: The shortbread-like crust here gets pressed in rather than rolled out, which makes it no-fuss and stress-free.
Get the **Fruit Tart recipe**.
AMANDA GRYPHON

Profiteroles sound fancy, but don't be intimidated. They're basically just little ice cream-filled, chocolate-covered puffs of goodness.
Get the **Profiteroles recipe**.
PHOTO: JOEL GOLDBERG; FOOD STYLING: MAKINZE GORE

Controversial opinion: Hand pies are better than regular pies. They have the perfect crust-to-filling ratio. They're less work than a classic double-crust pie, for sure. But perhaps the best part? No soggy bottoms!
Get the **Apple Hand Pies recipe**.
Erik bernstein

A sweet, chewy but tender pastry from Hawaii, butter mochi is one of our favorite things to bake. This recipe offers two options for topping: with shredded coconut, or with some granulated sugar and fire for a br?léed, crunchy, slightly bittersweet finish.
Get the **Butter Mochi recipe**.
Lucy Schaeffer

Traditional New Orleans beignets are a fried pastry made from French pate à choux, an eggy yeasted dough used for things like profiteroles and éclairs. To make things simpler, we made a unyeasted dough that comes together and fries up in minutes. Let the good times roll!
Get the **Easy Beignets recipe**.
Ethan Calabrese

These cheese puffs (aka *gougères*) are a triple threat: easy to make, impressive looking, and insanely delicious. And the good news is you probably already have most (or all) of the ingredients!
Get the **Cheese Puffs recipe**.
Joel Goldberg

This impressive *tarte au citron* is surprisingly easy to make. We love serving it with a big dollop of homemade whipped cream or candied lemon peel.
Get the **Best-Ever Lemon Tart recipe**.
Park Feierbach

Making these Chinese pastries look beautiful might take some practice, but it's really what's on the inside that matters here: The dough is soft but not too cake-y, tender with a slight chew, with a barely sweetened taste that pairs well with, well, almost anything. Our recipe includes three filling options—red bean paste, miso carrots, and pork.
Get the **Steamed Buns (Baozi) recipe**.
June Xie

This recipe is a great jumping-off point if you're trying to make morning rolls of *any* type. We're not saying you should mess with the dough—it's perfectly buttery and fluffy! Where you have some wiggle room is the filling. The world is *your* cinnamon roll, make it your own.
Get the **Classic Cinnamon Rolls recipe**.
Parker Feierbach

Mooncakes are a dense sweet made during the mid-autumn festival in Chinese culture to celebrate the harvest season and the fullest moon. Many fillings for mooncakes exist, though most tend to be sweet pastes made of either red bean, lotus seed, black sesame, or a mixture of fruit and nuts.
Get the **Homemade Mooncakes recipe**.
June xie

This all-butter recipe is perfectly flaky and super-easy to make yourself. (It's pretty similar to classic pie crust, minus the sugar.) You definitely won't regret taking the time to make it. Once you master this classic recipe, there's no quiche you can't make.
Get the **Quiche Lorraine recipe**.
Ethan Calabrese

Brioche is a yeasted dough that falls firmly into the enriched dough camp. Unlike simple lean doughs (think French bread or pita bread) that only need flour, yeast, water, and salt, enriched dough also has sugar, butter or oil, eggs, and milk or cream. The added fat changes the dough's behavior at each stage and yields a tender bite and a soft crust.
Get the **Brioche recipe**.
Parker Feierbach

Palmiers, also known as elephant ears due to their shape, are delicious and so simple to make. Sugar is sprinkled on top of flaky layers of puff pastry and then rolled so that, when cut, the cookies look like little hearts. So cute!
Get the **Easy Palmiers recipe**.
EMILY HLAVAC GREEN

A cross between cinnamon rolls and a croissant, these morning buns are a touch crispy-flakey on the outside, moist and super-soft on the inside, with a healthy dose of nuts, rum raisins, and cinnamon. Yum!
Get the **Morning Buns recipe**.
Chelsea Lupkin

Use a mix of tart and sweet cherries for the best balance and cherry flavor. By cooking the filling first, you'll be sure to get a jammy filling with perfectly cooked cherries. It's the dream pie, and of course, it's best with our perfectly flaky buttery crust.
Get the **Homemade Cherry Pie recipe**.
Erik bernstein

Rugelach is a soft pillowy, flaky filled pastry filled with jam or a sweet walnut and brown sugar mixture. It's a *must* for various Jewish holidays, but we love it year round too.
Get the **Rugelach recipe**.
Lucy Schaeffer

Italian bakeries have been serving up cannoli forever. The crispy shell and creamy sweet filling are nearly irresistible. Oftentimes, they come with mini chocolate chips or chopped pistachios or dipped in chocolate. No matter what topping you pick, they're a MAJOR treat. (It's why we couldn't stop ourselves from making cannoli cupcakes!)
Get the **Cannoli recipe**.
Parker Feierbach

Strudel is a layered pastry with a gooey filling, made extra easy thanks to store-bought phyllo dough. It can be done with all types of filling, but the most popular is apple, and this one is made even more delicious with the addition with cinnamon, lemon zest, and raisins.
Get the **Apple Strudel recipe**.
Ethan calabrese

Food writer Marisel Salazar shares her quick and easy recipe for her favorite pastry: pastelitos de guayaba. It's a popular Cuban dessert that you can find in many panaderias, but with minimal ingredients, you can make it at home too. In this video, instead of using puff pastry, she uses canned crescent roll dough—one of our favorite shortcut ingredients.
Get the **Pastelitos de Guayaba y Queso recipe**.
Hearst Owned

The tart is absolutely bursting with summery flavor thanks to a double-dose of blueberries. Brown butter adds a nutty depth of flavor to the crust. It doesn't take much time to make, but if you don’t feel like browning butter, just use plain melted butter for a crust that tastes just like a sugar cookie.
Get the **Blueberry Tart recipe**.
PHOTO: ANDREW BUI; FOOD STYLING: MAKINZE GORE

38 Pastry Recipes From Around The World That You Can Make At Home

1 of 39

If you’re like us, you’ve got a favorite local coffee shop or cafe, where the atmosphere is welcoming, the coffee is always great, and the pastries… oh, the pastries! While simple, classic options like banana bread or peanut butter cookies are staples, what we really get excited for are the mysteriously buttery and flaky options full of unexpected and unfathomable flavors and textures. We’re here to tell you, should you be up for the challenge, they’re totally achievable at home. In fact, with a little patience and creativity, you can make a variety of these sweet desserts from around the world, right in your own kitchen. Check out our 38 pastry recipes for ideas—you might just discover some new favorites among them.

Pretty much anywhere you could travel to will have their own variety of region-specific pastries that they’ve been known for for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. French pastries are some of the most well-known, and we’ve got recipes for all the classics here. Well-laminated dough (meaning it has had butter folded into it several times) is a lengthy, multi-day process, so we’ve admittedly taken some shortcuts to make some of them more achievable at home. Check out our shortcut croissants, macarons, madeleines, beignets, and profiteroles. Looking to expand your pastry knowledge? Try our Middle Eastern ma’amoul cookies, our Italian zeppole, our Jewish sufganiyot, our Mexican concha, our Japanese mochi, or our Chinese mooncakes. Remember—pastry chefs can take years to master these recipes, so if yours don’t turn out perfectly the first time, don’t stress! Pastries are as much about the process as they are about the end result, so enjoy the journey.

And don’t think it’s just sweets. Traditional pastry methods can translate to some very tasty savory options too, like Indian samosas, Turkish borek-inspired scrunch bread, Jewish potato knish, Greek spanakopita, and Chinese baozi (steamed buns). The great thing about these recipes is that once you’ve got their basic concept down, you can get as creative as you like with the fillings.

Want more dessert inspiration? Check out our favorite cookie recipes, our favorite pies, and our top dessert bars too.

Andrew bui

With a little patience and creativity, you can make a variety of pastries from around the world in your own kitchen. Check out our best pastry recipes.

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