ingredients
2-1/2 cups (12.2 oz/ 354 g) unbleached all-purpose flour
1-1/4 cups (5.0 oz/ 142 g) cake flour
1-1/2 teaspoon salt (you can cut this by half for a less salty dough or for sweet preparations)
1-1/4 cups (10 fl oz/ 300 ml) ice water
1 pound (16 oz/ 454 g) very cold unsalted butter
First make the puff pastry
1. The ingredients. Keep the butter cold.
2. Place the all purpose flour, cake flour and salt into a food processor. Then pulse to mix. (You can also stir them together by hand.)
3. Add water all at once and process until a ball forms. Chef Richard says not to worry about overprocessing here.
3. Form the dough into a ball, scratch a tic-tac-toe pattern on it (which helps relax the gluten in the dough), wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for 5 minutes.
4. Meanwhile lay out your cold butter between two sheets of plastic wrap…
…and pound away with a rolling pin. You want it to be 1 inch high. Try to keep it rectangle shaped.
If it starts to morph into strange shapes, mold it back to a rectangle with your hands. If the butter looks like it’s melting or greasy, refrigerate it again until firm.
5. On a lightly floured surface, roll out your ball of dough into about a 12 inch shape, but be sure to keep the center 4 inches of the dough slightly thicker than the outer flaps. That will be the butter bed.
5. Place the butter in the center, and start folding the flaps over it.
Until its all folded over the butter in a neat little package.
6. Flour the rolling surface again, and roll out the first rectangle. Try to manipulate the rolling pin so the butter rolls as evenly as possible inside the dough. It should be about 24 inches in length, but the exact size doesn’t matter. Width doesn’t matter at all.
Fold the flaps over each other like a business envelope.
You’ve accomplished what’s called “one turn.” We need a total of 6 turns.
7. If your pastry is oozing butter out of the sides or seems greasy in any way, it needs to be refrigerated for at least 30 minutes. If it’s still ok and firm, you can do one more turn right now.
Rotate the dough so it’s folded opening is to the side and the dough is jutting away from you.
8. Now repeat the roll, going to approximately 24 inches, and fold the flaps over each other again. This is turn two.
At this point, refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes to an hour, wrapped in plastic wrap.
Do 2 more turns as pictured above, refrigerate again, then do the final 2 turns and refrigerate again. Final dough.
Here’s the cross section. You can see the hundreds of layers throughout. It looks like the earth’s core.
At this point the puff pastry can be rolled out and used for any application. Or frozen until the cravings hit.
To make the vols-au-vents
1. Cut off 1/4 of your dough, and roll it out about 1/4 inch thick.
2. Cut out 4-inch circles. Then cut out holes from half of the available circles.
3. Lay them out on a parchment lined sheet pan, then dock them with a fork all over to let some of the steam out.
Egg wash the circles (egg wash consists of 1 egg whisked with 1 tablespoon water)
4. Glue circles on top and egg wash those.
5. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F and refrigerate the sheet pan while you wait for the oven. Bake until they are golden brown about 30 minutes.
Let cool completely before filling.
Next up: how to make a couple of different, easy fillings for some seriously elegant desserts.
