Rough puff pastry: puff pastry in 45 minutes
Anyone who has ever made puff pastry themselves knows that it is a hell of a job. It takes hours, so you usually reach for the ready-made pastry from the freezer. With this technique, however, you’ll be finished a lot faster—is it worth trying?
I have to admit that I usually buy my puff pastry ready-made, because it is of excellent quality and saves a lot of work. Still, it’s great fun to make it yourself at least once. The layers in puff pastry are created by incorporating cold butter into the dough. Air escapes from that butter as it bakes, creating all those layers. Somehow, when you’ve made all those layers yourself, they taste even better.
With classic puff pastry, you make a dough and a beurrage, which is a lot of butter mixed with a little flour. You make the beurrage in the same shape as your dough, and it needs to firm up for a few hours before you can use it. Then you fold the dough and beurrage around each other, roll it out and fold it up. You repeat this twice, and then the dough goes back into the fridge for at least two hours. You repeat that folding process two more times, and the dough needs to firm up for two hours each time. Before you’re sitting down to enjoy your pastry, it’s the middle of the night. With rough puff pastry, you create the same effect, but much faster.
The most important thing is that there are pieces of butter in the dough. You can also achieve that with frozen butter. Life hack!
Method
1. Mix 300 g flour, 50 g cold cubes of butter and a pinch of salt with your fingertips until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Do this with cold hands; if necessary, hold them under the cold tap for a moment beforehand. Slowly add 4–6 tbsp water and knead into a dough.
2. Roll out the dough on a floured work surface. Grate 60 g frozen butter over the bottom two-thirds of the dough. Fold the top third towards you and fold the bottom over it, as if you were folding a letter shut.
3. Turn the folded dough 90 degrees and roll it out again into a rectangle. Repeat the process with another 60 g frozen butter and fold it like a letter again.
4. Wrap the dough in cling film and let it rest for at least 30 minutes before using it.
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