- If you ever wanted to make homemade puff pastry
but were too intimidated to try,
then you've got to check out
my homemade puff pastry recipe.
And if you like this video,
don't forget to hit (bell chimes)
that like button and subscribe.
Hey, you're watching Preppy Kitchen
where I, John Kanell,
teach you how to make delicious homemade dishes
to share with your family and friends.
This puff pastry will ready
in two shakes of a lamb's tail,
plus a little bit.
So let's get started.
First off, we're gonna measure out the dry ingredients,
starting with two cups or 240 grams
of all-purpose flour.
(whispers) Perfect.
To which we're adding half a teaspoon of salt
and one tablespoon of granulated sugar.
You don't need that much.
Our scale is done.
We're gonna whisk this up
and then grab the butter.
And boy, do I have something
to say about that butter.
We're gonna freeze our butter
for at least 10 minutes.
We want it to be ice cold,
like ice, ice, ice.
Second of all,
if you use an American butter,
it's delicious,
but it actually has a fairly high water content in there.
So it's not pure fat.
It's just a little bit of milk solid,
a little bit of the watery stuff.
And this is a disaster
when you're making a puff pastry.
So you're gonna use a European style butter
like Kerrygold, for example.
This is not an ad for a Kerrygold
or any of those other butters.
But when I recipe tested those with different butters
that results were drastic
to the point where I had to like stop the video
and to start talking about it.
We're gonna grate this into our flour mixture,
just like this with a cheese grater.
I used to make my pastry like this.
It's not the best technique
for making a regular pie dough,
but for this puff pastry,
and it's actually a rough puff we're making,
so it's a slightly easier form of puff pastry.
And it starts with grading the butter.
We're going to mix it in
as we go along
because the butter is frozen,
but it'll melt
or it'll warm up instantaneously.
And we just want to grate and mix,
and grate and mix.
This recipe is by popular request.
I get so many people asking
for a homemade puff pastry recipe
whenever I use the store-bought
for something like the pastelitos or an appetizer.
I'm so happy you suggested it
because it's a really fun recipe to make.
I know a lot of times recipes call
for puff pastry,
and I use store-bought puff pastry too.
It's not something you need to be ashamed of.
It's so convenient and easy,
but you can make your own at home,
and it's gonna be just delicious.
There's only a few ingredients.
There's no chemicals or stabilizers,
and it's fresh.
If you don't want to take the risk,
you can totally just chop up
the last little bit of butter
but I know my cheese grater,
so, just grate all the way.
There we go, every last bits grated.
Remove all that butter
that's stuck to your cheese grater.
(metal clacking)
I forgot to mention,
if it's hot where you are,
you can keep this in the freezer
before you grate it
and it'll help just not melt the butter.
Okay, now we're gonna toss this together.
Just get all that butter well coated,
and you can, if you feel this,
it feels like cheese.
It's so crazy. (laughs)
But it's not, it's butter.
I have some ice water here.
Drizzle it over.
Don't just pour it altogether.
Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, drizzle.
As you go,
you can mix it up with a fork a little bit.
I have ice, ice cold death hands.
So this is like the perfect thing
for me to do all day.
If you run hot,
if you're not a corpse,
then you can just use a fork
or a knife to mix in most of this,
or put this in the freezer
to take some breaks.
Using my fork
just to mix this altogether,
I'm gonna switch to using my hands now
and just fold the mixture together.
I'm kind of like pressing and sliding a little bit.
It's not the same as kneading
or doing a full mix.
Right now it's starting
to form a loose crumble,
but not quite.
So I'm gonna drizzle over an additional tablespoon
at a time,
and mix together
until it really does come together a bit more.
I have like one ball where the water landed,
even though I was drizzling,
and the rest is a little too crumbly.
And you can let me know in the comments
what you like using puff pastry for.
For me, puff pastry is perfect
for really easy appetizers
or pastelitos de Guayaba.
I hope I'm not massacring that,
but they're like puff pastry
filled with a cream cheese mixture and guava.
Ahh, it's amazing.
It's one of my favorite treats.
Holding together in a cohesive mass,
it's time to wrap it
after we roll it a bit.
We're gonna roll this to about half an inch thick
and try and make it a nice square.
That's the one thing,
because it will help in the next step.
And when I say roll, I mean pat.
Your best tools as a baker are your hands.
'Cause they can really tell you what the consistency,
what the resistance you're getting,
how close something is to being done,
and even with a rolling pin right now,
it was lifting off some of the dough
and it's just making a bit of a mess.
And I didn't want to add more flour to this.
If you want,
you can roll it between some more parchment paper,
a little bit of plastic,
or you could flour the rolling pin
if you need to.
That looks just about right.
We're gonna wrap it carefully
so it doesn't dry out
and pop into the fridge.
But be right back
with the magic of editing.
(magical twinkling)
My dough is chilled.
So we're gonna start rolling and folding.
I'm working on a pastry mat,
which lets me lift things off
and make sure nothing will ever get stuck to the counter.
But if you're not using one,
just make sure to be a little bit more liberal
than you might imagine
you need to be with your flour.
I'm gonna place that
onto our floured surface,
and always move it around.
Don't let it sit for too long,
because it'll stick.
Just a little bit of flour for the top.
We're gonna roll this into a rectangle.
I'm gonna roll this into a rectangle.
You're not helping me right now.
(chuckles)
You'll see a little bit of cracking.
That's okay.
Don't worry about it.
You could pinch it together.
This is already such a beautiful color,
and I love the texture.
Have I been moving it around?
Nope, I forgot.
So it's starting to stick already.
Let's just sprinkle a little flour underneath there.
Now we can move it around,
and it's really important to do that.
'Cause if it sticks,
it's gonna be sad.
Okay.
Keep rolling it out.
Now for the folding.
I'm gonna fold this into thirds,
just like you're sending a snail mail letter
out to somebody.
When's the last time you did that?
It's folded.
I'm going to turn this around
and roll it out again.
Basically we're gonna roll and turn and fold
and roll and turn and fold.
That's what builds up
all those amazing, beautiful layers.
So we're folding in opposite directions.
And as you can see,
it's getting more and more supple
as we work it.
It's really great.
So relaxing,
and right now,
this is the last one.
We have lots of beautiful layers here.
We did kind of wake up the gluten.
So this needs a lot of rest time,
and he's to rest for a young, young time,
as my kids would say.
It needs to chill for at least two hours
but really I would do this a day ahead of time.
Then you can use this puff pastry
just like you would the store-bought kind,
except the taste is gonna be
that much more amazing.
Don't even think about arguing with me on that one.
I'm wrapping it.
It's gonna chill one more time,
and when we come back,
I'm going to show you how
to bake this up and make it amazing.
Once your puff pastry's all chilled up,
you're going to sprinkle some flour
onto your work surface.
Roll it out again and bake it up.
Chances are, if you're making this recipe,
you're making something else.
Maybe you're making pastelitos from scratch.
Anyhow, I wanted to show you
how this will puff up so beautifully.
So we're gonna bake some up right now
Roll to almost a quarter of an inch.
I'm cutting mine into rectangles.
You might want circles, triangles,
whatever your recipe calls for.
If you look really closely,
you can see all the layers in here,
and it hasn't even baked up.
I'm so excited for this.
Transfer to a lined baking sheet,
pop into your oven,
preheat it to 425,
and bake until puffy, golden and amazing.
If you liked this video,
check out my pastry playlist.
(pastry crunches)
Mm.
That tastes so much better
than store-bought puff pastry.
And it was so easy too.
I'll see you in the next video.