Spooning soup into flaky pastry

I usually write about sandwiches, but this week we’re making a handheld, stuffed pastry instead. I’ve written about handhelds before, and no one has yelled at me about it too much, so I think we can try it again. This time, with inspiration from the seafood-focused side of the internet.

What is this sandwich handheld?

Last week, on April 1st, Pop-Tarts Toaster Pastries released marketing for a brand-new savory pastry. From their Instagram post, it appears that they’re planning to collaborate with the international seafood chain Red Lobster to bring a cheesy Pop-Tart to Walmart and 7-Eleven stores near you.

This was the first time the world had seen Cheddar Bay biscuit-flavored Pop-Tarts, which are supposedly “hitting shelves soon.”

When I saw this Instagram post, I thought to myself, “Self, you’re pretty good with biscuits and not too bad with cheese, could you make your own Cheddar Bay biscuit Pop-Tarts at home?” I then checked online to see if my internet friends thought I should try, and my favorite responses didn’t hesitate; they just started suggesting options for the fillings.

A couple of suggestions were for crab rangoon, and at least one person mentioned lobster bisque. Those were both great suggestions, but instead I decided to go with the idea of filling a Pop-Tart with clam chowder.

Yes, I said clam chowder. Read along, we’ll get through this together.

Has anyone else ever made clam chowder-filled Pop-Tarts?

I don’t think so.

I can’t be 100% sure that no one has ever created Pop-Tart-style pastries filled with clam chowder, but I did do a little bit of online research and didn’t find any evidence. What I do know is that someone created a photoshopped version of a Pop-Tarts box in what appears to be jest, claiming that there was such a thing as New England Clam Chowder-filled pastries and posted about it on reddit.com. Apparently, their version was frosted!

This wasn’t a real product, though, so I think possibly my version will be the first Pop-Tart-style pastry filled with savory clam chowder. If you can find another version that I missed, let me know in the comments!

Before we start creating this pastry, we first need to familiarize ourselves with what the exterior and interior of this handheld delicacy will be made from.

What are Pop-Tarts?

Come on, you know what a Pop-Tart is. It’s a flaky breakfast staple that many kids like myself enjoy from time to time. The exterior is a crust that is similar to pie dough, and then that dough encloses what is usually a sweet filling, like strawberry or chocolate. Because of the dough’s similarity to pie dough, you can very easily create your own homemade pastries similar to a Pop-Tart with homemade or store-bought pie dough and jam or something like Nutella.

What are Cheddar Bay biscuits?

Cheddar Bay biscuits are a staple at the international restaurant chain, Red Lobster. These biscuits are stuffed with cheese and flavorings, and they’re given out for free as an accompaniment to whatever you order during your dine-in stay at the restaurant (not sure about take-out or delivery). As far as I am aware, Cheddar Bay biscuits are unlimited, meaning if you ask, they’ll keep bringing them to the table while you eat your meal.

These cheddar-y biscuits are so popular that Red Lobster has released a version of the mix that you can buy and bake at home. I happened to buy the Costco-sized version a couple of years back and felt like the contents and instructions produced a pretty good biscuit that’s pretty similar to the ones you get at Red Lobster.

For context, I’ve included some photos I took back in 2024 of the Cheddar Bay biscuit mix you can buy at the store. For those of you who like to make things from scratch, I also have a homemade version of these cheddar-y biscuits with my own recipe down below.

So, for the home version, Cheddar Bay biscuits consist of a biscuit mix that you combine with water and shredded cheese. Then there’s an “herb butter sauce” that is basted on top of each biscuit after the biscuits are baked. Cheddar Bay biscuits are the type of biscuit that are known as “drop biscuits.” This just means that they’re not laminated like a traditional Southern-style buttermilk biscuit. Instead, the dough is mixed in a bowl, and the rough dough is scooped out and “dropped” on a parchment-lined sheet pan to be baked.

If you study the ingredients above, you can see there are no seasonings other than salt in the biscuits. All the seasonings are in the herby sauce or topping, and all the cheese goes into the biscuit dough.

Introducing Clamothy, the bivalve mollusk

Since we’re being a bit silly and since we’re working from a fake piece of corporate marketing, I decided I needed to make my own marketing materials for my version of the Cheddar Bay biscuit poptarts. I also created a new mascot for my future canned clam company.

Here’s my design for Cheddar Bay biscuit-flavored Pop-Tarts filled with clam chowder and the mascot I created, Clamothy, the clam.

Homemade Cheddar Bay-style biscuits

I’ve been making a cheddary and herby biscuit recipe for a while now. This is basically the same recipe I’ve been sharing for a few years now as my super savory cheddar biscuits, except I converted this recipe to be baked drop-biscuit-style just like they do at Red Lobster. I created that super savory biscuit recipe with Cheddar Bay biscuits in mind, but I never released a drop biscuit version until now.

Drop biscuits require less effort than traditional biscuits, and they’re also less consistent in their appearance. If you’re worried about appearance, it really helps if you have a good scoop and keep the sizes consistent. You can also dip your fingertips very lightly in water and use them to adjust the shape of each biscuit.

Just in case you would prefer a flaky biscuit instead of a drop biscuit, here’s my super-savory cheddar cheese biscuit recipe that produces a biscuit with almost the same profile and flavor and 100% more layers.

Here’s my newest biscuit recipe that will produce some really tasty homemade Cheddar Bay-style biscuits with way less effort and 0% kneading and rolling that normal flaky biscuits require. These are still very soft inside and crispy on the bottom, just like you’d want. Let me know if you give this one a shot.

Homemade Cheddar Bay-style biscuits

Recipe

40 minutes

Homemade Cheddar Bay-style biscuits

Want a very similar play-at-home version of the addictive biscuits you can get at Red Lobster? This isn't going to be an exact duplicate, but it's really close. This recipe creates tender and soft, cheesy and savory biscuits with a slightly crunchy exterior.

Get Recipe

Clam chowder-ish stuff

At their most basic, clam chowder recipes are composed of five or six things: onion, celery, potato, clams, broth, and milk or cream (plus salt and pepper). You could add bacon, garlic, swap out the broth for water, add fresh or dried herbs like thyme or parsley, and even use flour to thicken the consistency.

All of those additions would be great if we were making soup. But we’re not. We’re making something thicker than soup that will have the flavors of clam chowder, but it should still stay inside the finished, baked pastry.

In my finished recipe down below, I still use the onion, celery, potato, and clams, but I skip the broth/water. Instead of milk or cream, we’re using cream cheese with the goal of a much thicker consistency that should keep the fillings inside the pastry instead of running all over our sheet pan.

Before you go running, flailing your arms, screaming away from this blog post because I’m combining seafood and cream cheese, it’s not weird. This is the same concept of what gets stuffed inside of crab rangoon. You like crab rangoon, right?

We’re just swapping out the crab for clams and adding onion, potato, and celery to the mixture, so everything is fine. I promise!

Cook the potato, onion, and celery

If we were making traditional clam chowder, we’d start with the potatoes because they take the longest to cook of all of the ingredients. Because of this and because this isn’t actually chowder, I went with potatoes that were already cooked. And then I crisped them up. I went with one of those frozen hash brown patties, crisped it up nicely, and then diced it into small pieces.

You might be wondering why I went with a hash brown patty instead of a regular potato. First off, those would take at least twice, if not three times, the amount of time in a pan to cook and get crispy. Second, I like to keep some of these patties in the freezer because they cook quickly and are great for impromptu breakfasts. Thirdly, I thought the flattened patty would be about the thickness of the interior of the Pop-Tart I was going to create, so a good rough chop would produce similarly sized potatoes to the celery and onion. These hash brown patties should be more than 90% potato, and technically, they’re already pre-seasoned with salt and normally pepper (the brand I’m using uses white pepper).

The onion and celery were treated much as they would have been in an actual clam chowder. I put some butter in a pan and sauteed the onion and celery until they were just a little bit soft. You don’t want them to be mushy because the texture really is important in the finished clam chowder filling.

Also, you need to make sure you dice the onion and celery into a pretty small dice. I attempted to get each piece smaller than a 1/4 inch cube so that the veggies wouldn’t cause the interior of the Pop-Tart to be too thick.

Once the onion and celery are softened slightly, they can be removed from the pan and allowed to cool before they are mixed into the rest of the clam chowder filling.

Clam chowder filling

Once you have all the ingredients ready, the filling is very easy to put together. Just add 1/2 a block of cream cheese (4 ounces) to a bowl with all of the potato, onion, and celery. Mince your clams up to about the same size as all the other ingredients and add those as well. Stir until it’s thoroughly mixed, and you’re done. Place this stuff back in the fridge until right before the time to fill the pastries.

Cheddar Bay-ing the pie dough

Store-bought pie dough is great. But it has very little flavor. We need to inject some cheddar and various simple seasoning powders to introduce Cheddar Bay-style flavor into each bite of our homemade Pop-Tart. To do this, I unshelled the pie doughs and layered on cheese and garlic, onion powders, and MSG. Then I added a second pie dough shell and folded those two a second time with even more cheese and seasonings in between the folds.

At this point, I had a thick, rough, dough pile that I then rolled into a much more reasonable shape.

Rolling out and cutting dough

Once the dough has been infiltrated with cheese and seasoning, you simply need to roll it out into a rough rectangle. I made my Pop-Tarts rather large, but you’re in control of that. I give several options in the full recipe below.

The key is to figure out how long you want your pastries and use that measurement to determine how wide you want the rectangle. Then, when you’ve rolled the dough fairly thin, use a sharp knife or pizza cutter to cut consistently sized rectangles. I have a “kitchen ruler” that I use to ensure that they’re all pretty much the same size.

Don’t forget to cut or poke some air holes in the top of each filled pastry to make sure there’s a place for steam to escape during the cooking process. This prevents a blowout from happening, where the filling might flow out and ruin your Pop-Tart. I used a fork to poke 4 or 5 times in the top of each pastry, but you can use a sharp knife as well.

Buttery herb topping

Just like the Cheddar Bay biscuits, a Cheddar Bay-style Pop-Tart pastry gets an herby butter spread painted on top after the baking is done. We’ve incorporated quite a bit of onion, garlic, and MSG into the pie dough, so this herby butter spread is simple, containing just melted butter, garlic powder, and dried parsley.

Painting this on top of each finished pastry softens the top, and it also adds a bunch of flavor and aroma to each Cheddar Bay Pop-Tart.

Clam chowder-filled Cheddar Bay biscuit pastry photos and recipe

Here are some photos of finished homemade Cheddar Bay-style Pop-Tarts filled with a clam chowder-ish filling. No one has ever typed that sentence before. These pastries aren’t so easy to photograph, but trust me, the finished product is a lot better than I thought they would turn out.

Keep scrolling past the photos to get the full recipe. Let me know if you’re crazy enough to try this one!

Clam chowder-filled Cheddar Bay biscuit Pop Tart-style pastry

Recipe

Clam chowder-filled Cheddar Bay biscuit Pop Tart-style pastry

Let's be real. You're not making this recipe. But I spent time creating it and writing it anyway. We're talking about a creamy, briny shellfish-laden, soup-similar filling tucked inside of an addictive, flaky, garlicky, and cheesy crust. Head to the store and pick up a few items, weekend breakfast isn't going to make itself!

butter cheddar clams cream cheese

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by Jonathan Surratt

Ingredients:

Clam chowder-style filling

• 1 teaspoon olive oil or neutral cooking oil
• 1 frozen hash brown patty
• salt and pepper
• 1 teaspoon butter
• ¹⁄₄ cup onion, finely diced
• ¹⁄₄ cup celery, finely diced
• 6.5 ounces canned chopped clams, finely chopped
• 4 ounces cream cheese, softened

Cheddar Bay-style pie dough

• 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (3 oz/85 g)
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• ¹⁄₄ teaspoon dried parsley
• ¹⁄₄ teaspoon MSG (optional)
• 4 frozen pie doughs, thawed

Assembly and baking

• ¹⁄₈ cup shredded cheddar cheese
• Cheddar Bay-style pie dough pieces (from above)
• Clam chowder-style filling (from above)
• 3 tablespoons melted butter (to be painted on top after baking)
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon garlic powder
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon dried parsley

Direct Link to Recipe

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Directions:

First off, if you're attempting this recipe, it will really help you if you at least scroll through all the photos in the accompanying blog post.

Clam chowder-style filling: add oil to a medium pan over medium heat. When the oil is shimmering, add the frozen hash brown. Season with salt and pepper. 

Cook the frozen hash brown patty for about 4 minutes per side, until the exterior is crispy and browned. Remove to a paper towel or cutting board to rest. After they've cooled for about 2 or 3 minutes, chop them into pieces about the same size as your onion and celery pieces.

Add a teaspoon of butter to the still-warm pan and then add the onion and celery. Lightly season with salt and pepper. Cook the onion and celery for about 5 minutes, until the onion has softened just a bit. Remove from the pan to a bowl to cool. 

Drain the canned clams and reserve the liquid for a clamato cocktail or discard it. Chop the clams into fairly small pieces.

Once the onion and celery have cooled, add them to a large bowl with cream cheese, potato pieces, and chopped clams. Stir to combine well. This is your clam chowder-style filling. Place the bowl back in the refrigerator until you're ready to fill the pastries.

Cheddar Bay-style pie dough: add the cheddar cheese to a bowl, and add the garlic powder, onion powder, dried parsley, and MSG to a separate bowl. This is your seasoning mixture. 

Carefully lay one pie dough out on a lightly floured surface. Top with 1/3 of the shredded cheese and sprinkle on 1/3 of the seasoning mixture. Place a second pie dough on top of the cheese and seasoning. You should now have two pie doughs with cheese and seasoning in between the two dough layers. 

Place a couple of tablespoons of cheese and a few pinches of seasoning on the bottom half of the circular pie dough and then fold the top half on top of the cheese and seasoning (like you're making a quesadilla). Now you should have a rough semicircle with several layers of dough sandwiching several layers of cheese and seasoning. 

With a rolling pin, roll this pile of dough into a rough rectangle. I shot for 6 inches wide by 15 inches long. Using a ruler or measuring tape, cut out rectangles that are the size of the Pop-Tarts you'd like. I went for large pastries, which meant 4 x 6-inch rectangles. But a regular store-bought Pop-Tart is 3 x 4.25 inches in shape. Just cut your rectangles to be the same size and shape because one rectangle will end up being the bottom of the tart, and one will be the top.

Once those two pie dough pieces are cheesed, seasoned, rolled, and then cut, do it again for the other 2 pie doughs using the rest of the cheese and seasoning. 

After all 4 pie doughs are finished and you have a stack of rectangles, place them in the fridge until you are ready to bake.

Preheat your oven to 375 F (190 C). 

Assembly and baking: place down one rectangle and add about 3 spoonfuls of clam chowder-style filling. Arrange the filling so it's in the middle of the rectangle with just a bit of dough showing all around. Try not to overstuff at this point.

Cover the filling with a second dough rectangle and then, using the tines of a fork, press down indentations all around the exterior to close the dough around the filling. Using that same fork, poke 3 or 4 times into the top of the pastry—in the middle where the filling is. These will be steam vents that will keep the filling from bursting out. 

Place the filled pastry on a parchment-lined sheet pan. Sprinkle a little bit of cheese on top of each Pop-Tarts and continue creating pastries until you run out of dough rectangles and filling. 

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, rotating the pan 180 degrees at about the 12-minute mark. 

Near the end of the bake time, melt some butter in a bowl in your microwave or in a pot on the stove, and add garlic powder and dried parsley. 

After the Pop-Tarts are baked and starting to brown just a little on the edges, remove them from the oven and paint on the buttery herb mixture with a pastry brush or the back of your spoon.

Allow the pastry to cool for about 10 to 15 minutes. If you try to eat them right out of the oven, they will be soft and somewhat floppy. They firm up as they cool. 

Check back next week

Next week, hopefully, we’ll be back on track, taking a trip to California. Pack your bags and bring some hearty white bread!