Hey everyone. It's Sam here and today I'm really excited to share my version of
puffed pastry. Now this is kind of a cheaters version of puff pastry. It's a
lot easier than traditional recipes that use a butter block and require long
periods of laminating, and chilling, and laminating. It's a lot simpler than any
of those recipes. It does still take a little bit of time, and of course a
little bit of technique. So I'm going to be walking you through all of the steps
today. Now the first thing you're going to need for today's recipe is 2 and 1/4
cups of all-purpose flour. You're going to want to put this in a large bowl.
Along with the flour we're going to be adding 1 tablespoon of granulated sugar, and 1 teaspoon of salt.
Just whisk your dry ingredients together so that everything is nicely combined
The next thing you're going to need is one cup, or two sticks of unsalted butter. Now if you can get your
hands on it I highly recommend using a European butter. It's just going to make
the puff pastry all that much better. It's going to give it a really nice
flavor, but regular butter that you buy from the store will work just as well.
Now it's really important that this butter be very, very, cold. So don't take
it out of the fridge until you're ready to use it. And what I actually like to do
is I'll pop it in the freezer about 20 minutes before I'm ready to start making
my puff pastry so it's really nice and cold. So in order to get this butter
worked into our flour mixture we're actually going to be using a box grater.
This is a technique I use with my flaky homemade biscuits. It works really great.
What I wanted to: Kind of funny it's a box grater and it works
great, sorry: What I'm gonna do is I'm going to grate the butter into my flour mixture.
As you can see I usually leave the wrapper on my butter. That way I just
have something to hold on to while I'm grating it. Once I get down to the bottom
I'll get rid of that and I'll cut up that last little piece of butter. Now I
also only grate the butter about half a stick at a time, and after I grate half a
stick, I'm just going to use a spoon to stir these butter pieces into the flour
mixture. I just like to do this intermittently so that the butter doesn't clump together.
And once you get down to just this small little piece of
butter at the end, I'll usually just use a knife to cut it up into small pieces.
And then I'll work that butter into the flour again.
Now the next thing that you're going to need is about seven to eight tablespoons
of ice water. You do want this water to be very cold; just like you want your
butter to be cold, because if your butter starts to melt, or your dough gets too
warm you're not going to get those nice puffy of flaky layers in your puff
pastry. So you definitely use cold water. Also you notice I say about seven to
eight tablespoons. It's very possible that your own puff pastry might need
less or more water. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to drizzle
this in slowly while stirring, and I'll show you what to look for to know that
your puff pastry has had enough water.
This is starting to come together, but I can tell from looking at it that it's
still a little bit too dry. We have too much flour, that I can see, that hasn't
been absorbed. So I'm just gonna add a little bit more water. Again I'm only
gonna do about a teaspoon or two teaspoons at a time until we reach the right consistency.
Alright so it's taken me about nine tablespoons but
finally the dough is the consistency that we're looking for, and what that is,
is if you're stirring it you don't see a lot of dry flour mixture. Most of it is
starting to cling to the butter and starting to cling together, however, it is
still a very shaggy and quite dry dough. The reason I know it's okay is because
if I take a piece of it and I pinch it together, it's sticking together. That's not crumbling apart
Now what we're gonna do is we're going to take
this and we're going to transfer it to a clean lightly floured surface.
I know it looks pretty messy right now but we're about to fix that. What you're going to
want to do is you're going to want to use your palms, your hands, to just work
this dough together until it's clinging together. You don't want to overwork the
dough otherwise you'll warm it up. You'll melt that butter. You're not
gonna have those flaky layers, but just use your hands to work this together so the dough is clinging together.
Use your hands to work this dough into a
rectangle. It'll be like a block. It should be about six by three inches.
Now we're going to need some plastic wrap, and we're gonna wrap up this puff pastry
dough nice and tightly and transfer to the fridge where it's going to need to chill for at least thirty minutes.
Before I take this away, I do just want to point
out that you still have these nice big pieces of cold butter in your puff
pastry. It might look like everything's not really well worked together. It's
supposed to look like that. You want to have these big chunks of butter in here.
That's what's gonna give us those flaky layers. Alright let me take this to the fridge.
Once your puff pastry dough has chilled for at least 30 minutes now
you're going to want to remove it from the fridge and we're going to transfer
it to a clean lightly floured surface.
You'll want to use a rolling pin to roll this brick out into an 8 by 12 inch rectangle.
Well at least that's pretty close to a rectangle. It's close enough. Now at this
point we're gonna start folding our dough. You're going to take the shorter
end, and you're going to fold it a third into the center.
Then you'll take the other end and fold that over the first edge.
Use the spatula if your dough is starting to stick to the counter.
So you just folded this dough kind of like you would be folding a letter.
Now you'll rotate this dough 90 degrees.
Lightly flour my surface again.
And we're going to do the same thing we're going to roll this dough into an 8 by 12 inch rectangle again.
Now we'll repeat the folding process where we fold this dough like a letter again.
Rotate our dough 90 degrees again.
And we're going to repeat this folding and rolling process until
we've done four turns of our dough. You'll notice with each turn the dough
gets nicer looking. It'll be a little less rough and shaggy looking each time.
Now what all of this folding and rolling and turning is doing is we are working
those buttery flaky layers into our puff pastry.
Essentially this is what's going to make that pastry puff when you bake it in the oven.
Alright let's give this dough one final fold.
You'll want to wrap it tightly with plastic wrap.
Now the last step is to let this puff pastry dough chill for at least 30 minutes in
the refrigerator before you use it. Now how you use this puff pastry dough
is up to you. What we've made here is the equivalent
of one box of store-bought puff pastry. This is great for using on top of
chicken pot pie, or making turnovers or making palmiers, which I will be
sharing a recipe for shortly. That is really all there is to making puff
pastry I really hope you guys enjoyed this cheater
version. I certainly love using it in my own house and if you try this out please
let me know what you think. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time.
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