World’s Healthiest Strawberry Pop Tarts, Filled with Real Fruit

By Jamie Hollis • 22 July, 2015

A warm pop tart split open on a plate, steam still rising off the strawberry center, is one of those small kitchen moments worth chasing.

This version skips the foil pouch and the corn syrup filling entirely, swapping in almond and oat flour for the pastry and a thickened fruit filling that gets its body from chia seeds instead of cornstarch or sugar.

The result bakes up flaky at the edges, soft in the middle, and holds together well enough to eat with your hands over the sink.

Eight pop tarts come out of one batch, each one landing around 170 calories with 4 grams of protein and 6 grams of sugar, nearly all of it coming from the strawberries themselves rather than a spoonful of white sugar folded into the dough.

A light yogurt glaze finishes the top, more tang than sweetness, which keeps the whole thing from tipping into dessert-for-breakfast territory.

Ingredients You’ll Need

The pastry relies on two cups of almond flour and one cup of oat flour, which together give a sturdier, slightly nuttier dough than an all-purpose flour crust would.

Cold vegan butter, cut in until the mixture turns crumbly, does the work of creating flaky layers, and a few tablespoons of ice water, added one at a time, bring the dough together without making it sticky. A pinch of salt rounds out the flavor.

For the filling, two cups of fresh or frozen strawberries, roughly chopped, form the base. Two tablespoons of chia seeds thicken the fruit as it cooks, and a tablespoon of granulated monk fruit sweetener adds just enough sweetness to balance the tartness without any refined sugar.

The glaze is nothing more than plain yogurt whisked with a couple tablespoons of powdered sugar substitute, thinned just enough to drizzle.

Why Chia Seeds Replace the Sugar-Heavy Filling

Most pop tart fillings lean on a mix of sugar and cornstarch to get that jammy, spreadable texture. Chia seeds do a similar job through a different mechanism: once they hit a warm, liquid environment, they absorb roughly ten times their weight and form a gel.

Simmering the chopped strawberries for about eight minutes with the chia seeds gives the fruit time to break down and the seeds time to swell, so the filling thickens on its own without a starch slurry or extra sweetener to mask a bland base.

The almond-and-oat flour pastry works on a similar logic. Almond flour has almost no starch, so it doesn’t behave like wheat flour. There’s no gluten to develop, which means no risk of a tough, overworked crust. Oat flour adds just enough structure to hold the dough together when it’s rolled and cut.

Chilling the dough for 20 minutes before rolling matters here more than it would with a traditional pastry, since the vegan butter needs to firm back up after being worked by hand, and a cold dough is what keeps the layers distinct once it hits the oven.

Assembling and Sealing the Pop Tarts

Once the dough is rolled out, cutting it into 16 even rectangles keeps the pairs consistent: eight for the base, eight for the tops. The filling should be fully cooled before it goes anywhere near the dough; warm filling softens the pastry and makes sealing much harder.

A spoonful in the center of each bottom rectangle, kept well away from the edges, leaves enough bare dough for a proper seal.

Crimping the edges with the tines of a fork does two things at once: it presses the top and bottom layers together so the filling can’t leak out during baking, and it creates that familiar ridged border. Press firmly all the way around, checking corners especially, since that’s where gaps tend to open up in the oven.

A few small steam vents poked into the top of each tart (three or four fork pricks is enough) let built-up steam escape instead of splitting the pastry open somewhere less tidy.

Baking at 375°F for 20 minutes brings the pastry to a light golden color. Letting the tarts cool completely on the pan before glazing isn’t optional. A warm surface will make the yogurt glaze slide right off instead of setting into a thin, even layer.

The last tray of eight usually disappears fastest with the ones that got an extra-thick drizzle of glaze, the yogurt tang cutting right through the strawberry sweetness on the first bite.