Fig & Goat Cheese Puff Pastry Roll

Even novice bakers will impress party-goers with this Fig & Goat Cheese Puff Pastry Roll. Tangy goat cheese teams up with sweet fig jam rolled up inside layers of light and crispy puff pastry. You get a little bit of protein from the goat cheese, which becomes even more creamy right out of the oven. Keep reading for our expert tips, including how to ensure the puff pastry is easy to work with.

Tips from the EatingWell Test Kitchen

These are the key tips we learned while developing and testing this recipe in our Test Kitchen to make sure it works, tastes great and is good for you too! 

• While the recipe calls for fig jam, you can achieve excellent results with any flavor of preserves, such as blackberry, strawberry, raspberry or apricot. Feel free to experiment by adding crushed nuts or chopped dried fruit. You can swap out the goat cheese for brie, mascarpone or another favorite soft cheese.
• To work with store-bought frozen puff pastry more easily, let it sit out of the box for about 10 minutes before rolling it out with a rolling pin on a pastry mat or work surface. Make sure to dust your work surface with a little flour to prevent the dough from sticking. You can do this while your oven is preheating.
• Cutting the pastry log into 10 pieces will be much easier and cleaner if you use a sharp knife and wipe the knife down with a towel between cuts.
  

Nutrition Notes

• Goat cheese brings tangy and creamy elements to this puff pastry appetizer. Like other types of cheese, it also adds some muscle-building protein and bone-strengthening calcium. It even contributes some probiotics, those good-for-your gut bacteria.
• Fig jam is sweet and pairs perfectly with savory notes—like goat cheese. While the jam isn't going to add a lot of nutrition beyond a few grams of carbohydrates, figs themselves will give you some gut-friendly fiber and inflammation-busting antioxidants.
• Puff pastry makes this appetizer hard to turn down with all of its golden, flaky layers. It adds some carbohydrates to this recipe. If you want to make this app gluten-free, Schär brand makes a gluten-free puff pastry—it even made our list of the best puff pastries.