- [Daniel] This has been in the oven for,
honestly about an hour.
- You know what I always say.
Good puff pastry should make a (bleep) mess.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Like it should be all over you.
Chef, hello.
What are we doing today?
- So we're gonna make puff pastry.
But we're gonna make inverse puff pastry.
Normally when you're making puff, you'd roll out your dough,
you take your butter package,
you put it in the middle
and you'd fold the dough over it like that.
Here, we're doing the opposite, inverse-style.
Also we're gonna make it all by hand
because we don't really have very many machines, yeah.
So it's gonna be basically just
pieces of wood on a wooden table.
- I literally am so excited to see you do this
only because that's been like a, some sort of pastry legend.
Oh, puff pastry by hand, can it be done?
How much longer do you think it takes
to do it by hand than with, if you had a sheeter.
- It's not exceptionally much longer.
We've gotten to the point where, bang it out
and it goes pretty quickly.
- The other thing I've also heard is that inverse
puff pastry is almost better for filled laminated doughs.
- I find it's true.
I feel, A, it gets crispier on the outside
'cause the entire thing is basically smeared with butter,
and then fries from the outside in.
And we do definitely get a lot of nice lift to it
with some nice very definitive layers in between.
First step, so we need to make the butter portion
and the dough portion.
Just butter, and this is bread flour.
And we just basically pile it together until it's smooth,
and then we'll spread it out, so.
We're gonna do it all basically in one day
but whatever we make today
will be a three-day processor, so.
- Whoa, whoa whoa.
- Yeah, because it's just so much
chilling and then re-rolling and chilling and re-rolling.
I'm just trying to get the butter and flour smooth,
but I'm trying not to actually aerate it too much.
So if it's got too light, too white in color,
it'd have too much air mixed into it
and then it wouldn't be plastic, it wouldn't be flexible.
- How do you fix that?
- You don't.
This will be the basis that
we're gonna wrap around our dough.
- So this is considered the butter block.
- This is the butter block.
- Okay.
- Which, in regular puff pastry, non-inverse puff pastry,
this would go on the inside.
In a lot of cases that would just be pure butter.
We'll put this in the fridge and then we'll make the dough.
Mmm, butter, flour.
- Oh, but it's kinda good.
- We're gonna take more bread flour, a little bit of salt.
I add vinegar.
I like to add acid to some of my vi noise.
It kinda makes it a little bit stretchier,
which gives it a little easier to fold,
and also the end result is a little bit more flaky.
It's definitely one of those things that like,
Grandmas would do.
Where it's like oh yeah,
you add a little bit to your pie crust.
And then for some reason generations stopped doing it.
I don't know why.
- Probably the smell.
- The smell.
- They're just like, you know.
- And then I like to add a vanilla bean to the dough,
and then ice water,
and then we'll add some butter towards the end.
So this is gonna go for a while at high speed.
- Wow, uh, most mixers say do not
put the dough hook beyond stir speed.
- Oh, I think, I mean if you want, we can...
- (gasps)
- Yeah, yeah we're crazy.
You can't stop us.
- Oh your poor mixer!
- It is very wet.
But it will firm up overnight
when we put it in the fridge.
- Oh my god, we have to wait overnight?
- Yes, time passes.
- Oh my gosh.
- For at least several hours because A,
we want it to rest and relax,
B, we want the flour to absorb all the moisture.
These both rested overnight, in the fridge.
So we have the dough portion which is now a lot firmer.
We're gonna basically just start forming this
to fit onto the butter package.
- Does slapping it help?
(laughs)
Is that the technical maneuver?
- [Daniel] Now I'm gonna be self-conscious of that.
(laughs)
- [Daniel] And so now we take our butter pack.
- [Rebecca] Look at that color contrast.
- Yeah.
Like I said, you know, usually are like, oh butter's white.
It's like, mmm.
I mean this one is definitely
more of a brownish-yellow color.
The end result we're really looking for is just
layers of dough and butter and dough and butter.
Here, I mean you can't see the dough coming through
but after we do a couple folds,
you'll start seeing the vanilla beans peeking through.
- I don't think a lot of pastry chefs
are doing this by hand.
- So either you're buying puff pastry
if you don't have a dough sheeter,
or you have a dough sheeter.
Which, again, if we had a dough sheeter,
in this stage it's so delicate, temperamental,
that I wouldn't trust it to a machine.
- So you're actually making classic,
the most classic desserts here.
Staying true. - We try to.
That's what I think is more exciting to us.
A lot of times I'll go to
all the great cookbook stores here in New York City,
and I like to go searching and I'd look up a copyright page
and if it says Copyright 1958, I'm like, perfect.
And then if it's in French, I'm like, even better.
And then if you, in my minimal kitchen French,
if the recipe is like, go to the hen house
and gather an egg, you're like, that's what I want, yeah.
Take a handful of sugar and you're like, all right,
we're gonna figure this one out.
But yeah, there's our first fold.
And now, we can put it in the fridge and chill it.
- It's chilled for how long?
- Depends on the weather, - Yes! Excellent answer.
- Which is annoying when it's a 80 degree day and humidity.
- There's no definite number.
- This has been chilling, this has only had one fold on it.
So now we're gonna turn it 90 degrees.
- How important do you think it is
for restaurants to have an actual pastry team
that are actually doing dishes like this?
- Again, it's if you need that,
if you wanna get to that next level.
With pastry, with the end of the meal,
we're bringing them something sweet.
But a lot of times, our department is not bringing in money.
We're bringing in that extra special something.
We're making it so from a really good restaurant
to a great restaurant.
The two schools I feel of pastry these days,
especially in New York City,
there's the 'ice cream sundae',
which food critics in town have besmirched
the name of the ice cream sundae
because they'll just be, well all we do is a sundae.
Or yeah this new Nordic dessert, which is
beautiful earthenware bowl, with some sort of cream,
and it's just a mess in a bowl.
Which might be delicious but there's no skill to it.
Two folds now.
We can put one more on it now.
- [Rebecca] Oh right now?
- Yeah.
And then we chill it again.
Okay.
- Last. - Last one.
- Is there anything different about this round?
- No, exactly the same.
- [Rebecca] What's that speckle?
- [Daniel] Vanilla bean.
- [Rebecca] Why'd you take it out?
- Well 'cause you called attention to it.
All right, so we'll chill this.
- Feel sore.
Look look, so shredded.
My shirt's just ripping at the edge.
(laughs)
- Our puff has been rolled, sheeted, chilled.
Now we cut it, and then we bake it.
I mean it's Autumn right now,
so we'll make a roasted apple mille-feuille.
Some roasted apples, some puff pastry,
a little bit of whipped cream in there as well,
creme patisserie.
We're jut gonna cut it into a strip
and then throw it in the oven.
- [Rebecca] Okay.
- [Daniel] And then bake it off.
- [ Rebecca] Oh my god.
- [Daniel] Yep.
So.
- [Rebecca] So flaky.
So these are apples that we
cooked in the style of tarte tatin.
Basically we made a tarte tatin without
the puff pastry on top.
So we took sugar, we caramelized it, we add butter to it,
and then we just roasted the apples in it.
- So it's almost the same as when you test a creme brulee,
where you're like, crack.
- [Daniel] There you go.
- Like this why you always save room for dessert.
Desserts like this are worth waiting for.
Thank you for letting me into your kitchen.
- Great having you here and I'm glad
I got to show you how to make puff paste.
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