Day 8 - Puff pastry

Hello fork musketeers!

Today we'll be covering puff pastry basics. Whooaa!

From this...

To these!

There are a lot of suggestions to make this show-stopping dough easier to make. What I'll be talking about today is some tips and know-hows to help you make better and tastier puff pastry.

Puff pastry has two main parts: the détrempe - the basic dough before the cold butter - and the actual, cold butter. Détrempe is basically flour; water; salt; vinegar and melted butter. The vinegar will prevent gluten from developing and it will prevent the pastry from graying (who knew?!). The melted butter will give the pastry a more intense butter flavour than cold butter.

The dough should be very soft and slightly sticky. When it's done, put it in the fridge for a minimum of 20 minutes. You can leave the détrempe in the fridge for about 4-6 days due to the vinegar.

Now the butter. It's important to know the kind of butter you have available. Ideally, when you're making pastries, you want butter with a low water content. Chef uses butter from New Zealand and suggested to not use our local butter (Quebec/Canada). A higher water content butter can contribute to your dough tearing during the rolling process.

Now, alternatively, if you only have a high-water content butter, you can lessen the amount of flour in your détrempe and put it in your butter. It will absorb some of the water, although Chef says it gives the pastry a stronger flour-y taste.

The butter should be formed in a square while it's soft; then placed in the fridge to firm up. Once it's firm, the butter needs to be folded in - an act called beurrer.

When you're ready to make puff pastry, you can fold it in different ways. One way is to roll it out into a four-star shape. You can also roll it out in a square and just fold it over the sides. Whatever method you decide, you'll have to roll it out so that the length of your dough is about three times the width. Also, when you're working the dough, you want the seam to be facing you and opening up like a book.

Since the butter is cold, it'll help to give it a few whacks before rolling. When rolling, you'll have to press down then roll; rinse and repeat until the dough is at the desired length. Don't be shy with the flour but each time you fold the dough brush off the excess flour; you don't want pockets of flour folded into your dough, after all.

If your dough gets rolled out like this:

Then you can cut the weird part and put it on the other side like so:

And place the triangle onto the other part of the edge. The idea is to even out the edge so you have end up with an even product.

Each time you roll out your dough, it should be done in two turns - rolling and folding - and refrigerated between two turns. Fold for a total of six times; five times when you do palmiers. It's really important to refrigerate the dough after two turns to keep the butter firm. Once you're done, you can cut and roll out whatever you want!

Protips

1. You can mark the dough with indentations to remember how many turns you've done.
2. When you "recycle" scrap pieces, don't smoosh them together into a ball. The entire point of puffy pastry is to keep the layers. Smooshing them together will ruin it. Remember to keep the layers in the same orientation at all times!
3. Puff pastry freezes very well.
4. When you're making it by hand, it's very normal to have a few small tears and to see chunks of butter. There might be some melted butter on your tray when you bake; this is very normal.
5. Try to use a low-gluten flour for this. Gluten will not only make it harder to roll out but it will also make the final product hard. It will also help reduce tearing.
6. All puff pastries need to be cut on the ends to help the pastry develop.
7. If you're selling puff pastry, customers tend to like their puff pastries a bit on the larger side.

That's it for today. This weekend I will be posting the recipes we covered this week!