Blueberry Turnovers

These homemade Blueberry Turnovers are worth the effort to make at home, with a luscious jammy blueberry filling baked inside of flaky puff pastry.

Homemade Blueberry Turnover Recipe

These Blueberry Turnovers feature a homemade "quick" puff pastry and a sweet and juicy blueberry filling. However, you can just as easily use store-bought puff pastry in a pinch.

The filling is made quickly on the stovetop and is all about the blueberry flavor, with just a hint of lemon juice to brighten it up without distracting from the intensity of the berry.

While these are best enjoyed the day they're eaten, they can be prepared and frozen unbaked ahead of time, or even baked ahead of time and reheated before serving (more on that below).

Take advantage of blueberry season and make these Homemade Blueberry Turnovers, you won't regret it.

So, let's get to making it, shall we? The text below offers tons of tips and helpful notes, or you can scroll to the bottom to grab the recipe and get started!

More of a visual person? Check out the video of me making it below, located right above the recipe!

Ingredients Needed

Here is an overview of the ingredients needed for this recipe. The full recipe is listed below in greater detail.

• fresh or frozen blueberries
• granulated sugar
• cornstarch
• kosher salt
• lemon juice
• vanilla extract
• butter
• puff pastry (homemade or store-bought)

Frozen or Fresh Blueberries

This recipe is totally flexible in terms of what blueberries you use. You can use fresh blueberries or frozen blueberries. I've made these fresh, frozen and wild blueberries.

Hands down, my favorite type of blueberries to use are wild blueberries. I almost always have a big bag of frozen ones in my freezer. They are available year-round in the store, or if you time it right, you can get a large crop of them in the summer and freeze them yourself. I love using frozen wild blueberries because they have excess juice that makes the blueberry pie filling nice and lush, which I think creates a better flavor than that of standard blueberries.

Useful Tools to Make This Recipe

Here is a list of some of the primary tools I use in this recipe. You won't necessarily choose to use them all, but they are exactly what I used. Any links may contain affiliate links.

• stand mixer (only if you are making the puff pastry)
• 13"x18" sheet pan (also known as a half sheet pan)
• rolling pin
• ruler and pastry wheel or sharp knife (to cut squares from the pastry)
• pot (to cook the blueberry filling)
• kitchen essentials: baking scale, bowls, measuring cups and measuring spoons, rubber spatula

Overview of Steps

The number of steps needed to make this recipe depends on if you plan to make your puff pastry from scratch. More on this below.

• Make the puff pastry, and chill it (or, skip the step if you are using store-bought).
• Make the blueberry filling and chill it.
• Roll out and cut the puff pastry to 6 squares.
• Assemble the turnovers.
• Bake!

Let's Talk Puff Pastry

Puff pastry is a classic french pastry made by laminating butter in a dough repeatedly until the final pastry has many hundreds of alternating layers of butter and dough. Rough puff is a more streamlined version of it, that is less fussy but with extremely similar results.

Rough puff is made by laminating (or layering) an enriched butter dough that is very similar to pie crust, except that it's rolled and folded five times.

This blueberry turnover recipe calls for rough puff, but if you wanted to make the classic puff pastry, you certainly could! The recipe makes six turnovers and uses only half the batch of the rough puff recipe. Save the other half for another pastry, or different flavors of turnovers, or you can even double the batch. You'll never be disappointed if you have puff pastry ready to go in your freezer.

Can you buy puff pastry at the store? You absolutely can. However, the turnovers will be a little bit smaller than the ones you can make with homemade rough puff. And, depending on the type of puff pastry you buy, the instructions for cutting the pastry squares might differ slightly.

Purchased puff pastry typically either comes in one folded 14-ounce sheet, or it comes in two folded 8-ounce sheets. Although I haven't tried all brands, so your store-bought puff pastry may be different than this.

The measurements listed in this recipe correspond with the use of my homemade rough puff recipe. If you have purchased puff pastry with 1 sheet, try to roll it out to slightly thinner to an 8"x12 rectangle and cut out 4" squares. If you are using puff pastry with two sheets, I suggest rolling out each sheet a little thinner and cutting them into 4 squares each, which will mean you will get 8 turnovers. See the notes of the recipe for more information.

Making the Blueberry Filling

Turnovers bake relatively quickly, which means there wouldn't be enough time for the filling inside to bake by the time the puff pastry has finished cooking. For this reason, the blueberry filling must be cooked ahead of time.

Making the filling is a very simple recipe. Essentially, blueberries are combined together with sugar, lemon juice, and cornstarch and then cooked.

Please note: The blueberry filling must be completely cooled before filling the turnovers. Hot filling in butter-heavy pastry always equals a disaster. So be sure to plan ahead of time.

You likely will have some leftover filling. You can enjoy any leftovers over ice cream or yogurt. It also freezes well.

How to Form Puff Pastry Turnovers

Let me just start this off by sharing the puff pastry golden rule: if at any point your pastry is getting too warm, simply place it in the refrigerator or freezer to chill. Warm puff pastry is not only sticky but also tricky to work with.

Depending on what puff pastry you are using, you should have about six 4.5" squares of pastry to work with.

Filling the turnovers is a delicate balance of not overfilling them, and not under-filling them. If you find that you are having trouble closing the turnovers without the filling leaking out everywhere, then use less filling.

Here are a few tips I've picked up for successfully filling turnovers:

• Make sure your pastry and filling are well chilled.
• Puff pastry is delicate and can be sticky. Use a small piece of parchment to help move around the pastry, so you don't have to handle it. Shape the turnover on the parchment, and then when transferring the filled turnover to the sheet tray, do so on the parchment, so you don't have to hold it with your own hands. This prevents the pastry from tearing which can compromise the seal on the filling.
• Use these three methods of sealing the turnovers: first press together the corners that firm the triangle, then seal it with a fork, and finally cut off the very edge of the sealed pieces. That final cut helps the puff pastry bake up properly, as well as helps it stay sealed.

Blueberry Turnover Baking Tips

Want your turnovers to bake up nicely? Then chill them before baking! The instructions list a bare minimum time to chill, but the longer the better.

Chilling the pastry before baking makes the puff pastry bake up higher. It also helps the filling stay inside the turnover instead of spilling out during the baking. And lastly, the chilled puff pastry is less likely to bake up misshapen.

Because the filling is pre-cooked, I find it unnecessary to poke holes in the pastry to let steam escape. However, if you'd like to make holes in the pastry for aesthetic reasons, it's fine to do so.

To bake, preheat the oven to 400ºF and set a rack in the middle position in the oven. This small step of baking it in the middle will ensure the puff pastry bakes throughout but doesn't brown too much on the bottom.

The blueberry turnovers are done when they have puffed up, are golden brown all over, and the filling has started to peek out on some of them.

If you are baking from a very cold or frozen state, you may need to bake the turnovers for slightly longer than the instructions call for.

How to Store Them

Blueberry turnovers can be frozen prior to baking for up to 3 months. Assemble the turnovers up to the point of egg wash and a sugar shower, and then freeze them flat on a sheet tray for 24 hours. Then, transfer to a bag with as much air removed as possible. Freeze for up to 2 months.

The turnovers can also be baked from frozen. Just don't forget to egg wash and sprinkle with sugar beforehand. Bake them as directed plus an extra 10 additional minutes or so.

More Blueberry Recipes

• Classic Blueberry Pie
• Blueberry Icebox Cake
• Blueberry Hand Pies
• Cranberry and Blueberry Pie

I am so honored when you make a recipe from my site! If you make these Blueberry Turnovers, please leave a comment and a star rating with your experience! If you have any questions about this recipe, feel free to comment here, too!

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