Puff Pastry-Off to a Good Start

Puff Pastry-Off to a Good Start

Maybe you've never wondered about the origins of Puff Pastry but I have.  I actually googled it and found that there is folk lore and even a link that discusses it.

https://bitterbutter.org/2017/11/14/who-really-invented-puff-pastry/

In spite of the myths, how many of us have 'accidentally' made puff pastry.  I'm a frugal baker.  If I put the time into making a crust, I don't leave scraps.  I throw them into the refrigerator until the next day if I'm lazy and then re-roll them and cut them into shapes or sprinkle with cinnamon or do something to ensure that every buttery morsel is consumed.   When you roll, re-roll and fold these chilled scraps, you're bound to get an accidental puffing of the pastry every once in a while.   This happens because re-chilled butter gets smashed between layers of flour and water.  When the water turns into steam during baking, it pushes that butter layer up and creates that flake.  Getting more layers means getting more flakes.

So if you're going to try to find the origins of this wonderful creation, I suspect every one of us could find a descendant who put flour, water and butter together and....voila....puff pastry.

Pastry chefs have perfected the art of getting a ridiculous number of layers of flake.  They have even created complex cooking terms to reference both the dough and the butter brick.  In spite of that, it's really just a combination of butter, water and flour that is rolled and re-rolled.

I'm not going to go into the chemistry of the cooking.  I'm just a practical cook who likes to experiment.  I've played around with puff pastry from other recipe books but I'm on my first journey to create a 'Rustic Spinach Pie' from the Italian cookbook....Scuola di Cucina.  The first ingredient in this Torta (Pie) is Puff Pastry so I'm diving in.  The Puff Pastry recipe in the Scuola di Cucina cookbook is similar to others I've made so I have to be careful not to miss any subtleties that takes me off course.

I'll show you pictures of each step in the process so that you can see what it looks like from a non-professional cook and non-professional photographer's perspective.  I'm juggling doughy hands with my phone camera.  This is as real as it gets.

According to the translation of the Italian for this recipe....."Puff pastry is a mixture of flour and water to which butter is added in the same quantity as the flour." For a pound of puff pastry, you need 250 grams of flour (1.75 cups) and 250 grams of butter (1 cup plus 1.5 tablespoons).

So...you can call it an artery blocker, a fat pill or a widow maker.  However, I consider it to be one of the most fabulous accidental discoveries in human history in spite of all that.

Every moderately serious cook should make it at least once...just to say they've done it.  I guarantee that it's a whole lot easier than it sounds and tastes a whole lot better than ones purchased from a grocery store made out of cheaper fats.

In the interest of being both a practical cook and someone who hates to make a complete mess, I can give you some tips before you jump in. 

• Read the daggone instructions before you start so you can prepare your work surface and tools.  If you can get everything within an arm's length, you can avoid that messy opening and closing of cupboards with gooey hands as you're mixing dough. Also...when it says to place the dough in a piece of plastic wrap, it makes it a lot easier to actually have that plastic wrap laid out and ready.  
• If you don't own a gram/ounce conversion scale, I'd recommend it.  However, I've done my best with conversions.  You'll have to eyeball .4 cups vs a 1/2 cup measure.  When you do this often enough, you'll probably want the scale...which is why I bought it a long time ago.  
• A lot of pasta and dough recipes talk about dumping flour on the table and going at it.  I actually use a stainless steel bowl to minimize the mess and clean-up.  It seems to work fine most of the time.   Otherwise, I feel like I'm finding or cleaning up dried dough for days.

Here's the step by step recipe I translated.  I added lots of photos in the hope that it will save you some of the pain of looking up other videos and 'how to' sites on the internet. 

PUFF PASTRY

Ingredients for 1 pound of Puff Pastry:

• 250 grams of butter (1 cup plus 1.5 tablespoons of butter)
• 250 grams of flour (approximately 1.75 cups of all purpose flour)
• Scant 1/4 teaspoon of salt
• .4 cup of cold water (note the decimal!).....96 grams

Instructions:

1. Cut the butter into small pieces directly out of the fridge (first photo below).  Add 1/4 of the flour (this is about .6 cup of flour...again, note the decimal point).  Using your fingertips, rub the butter and flour together (second photo below) until you get a clay-like molding butter (third photo below).  It will be tempting to keep playing with your food but stop when the butter is incorporated.  Then pat the butter into a rectangular brick (fourth photo below).  Wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Take the rest of the flour and the scant 1/4 teaspoon of salt and mix them together in a stainless steel bowl.  Alternatively, if you want to mess up another tool, you can use a sifter.  The goal is to just distribute the salt evenly.  One part of the recipe also suggests that you can dilute the salt in the water before adding the water.  I didn't do this but it sounds like a good plan if you really want to distribute it evenly.  Make a well in the middle of the flour and slowly add the cold water.  Play with your food again by using your fingers to start to mix this up (first photo below).  Just swirl the water around the well and pick up more and more flour until you have a clump of dough.  Once you've incorporated all the flour, you can start to knead the dough until it gets relatively smooth (second photo below)  Wrap in plastic and put in the fridge for 30 minutes.
   
   
3. After 30 minutes in the fridge, unwrap the dough.  Lightly flour your work surface and roll it out to a little less than .5 inch thickness.  Try to make the dough 3 times longer than it is wide.  Unwrap the butter brick and put it in the center of the rectangle (first photo below).  Flip the top and bottom portions of the pastry up over the brick (second photo below).  You want to try to have the width of the rectangle close to the same width of the butter brick.  Use your rolling pin to gently pound the encased butter (third photo below).  If you take out too much aggression on this poor pastry, the butter will explode out of the sides instead of getting evenly distributed.  When it's softened enough to roll, roll it out to a 5 x 15 inch rectangle or 3 times longer than wider and a little less than 1/2 inch thick (fourth photo below).  Mold the sides of the rectangle with your fingers to get it as even as possible and then refold the rectangle into threes(fifth photo below).  This is called the first 'turn' of the dough.  Wrap the dough in plastic and refrigerate for 15 minutes. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Unwrap the chilled dough and lightly dust with flour.  Roll it out again into roughly a 15x5 inch rectangle and refold into thirds.  Make two  thumbprints on the surface of the dough  to represent that you have just completed 2 'turns' of the dough.  Wrap in plastic, refrigerate for 15 minutes and repeat the process for a total of 6 turns.   You can see that the imprint of my finger did not spring back.  This is what you want.  When the dough is too elastic, it will be too springy.  You can avoid this by not overworking the dough.  This shouldn't happen.  It doesn't take too much work to roll this nice pliable dough into a rectangle.  
   
5. So here is the math on the layers.  You started with 3 layers (bottom layer of dough, butter and top layer of dough).  You folded this three times and rolled it out.  This created 9 layers.  On turn #2, you now have 27 layers (9 layers times 3 folds). At turn #3, you have 81 layers (27 layers times 3 folds, turn #4 results in 243, turn #5 results in 729 and finally by turn #6 you have 2187 layers of microscopic buttery goodness.    You can now see why it's important to keep track and not miss a 'turn'.  Going beyond 6 turns is an experiment begging to happen but I'm not willing to take the chance this time.
6. And that's it.  By the time you do this 6 times, you are ready to use the pastry in any recipe or freeze it to be used at a later date....just thaw in the fridge for a few hours.  

This pastry appears in multiple recipes in the cookbook I'm trying to translate so it's a great leaping off recipe.  

I haven't actually baked it yet but will be making a Rustic Spinach Torta (pie) this week to see if I flip the page on this recipe in success or declare it as a flop.  I'll update this post to include the finished product.  Fingers crossed.

Buono Mangiata
Good Eating!

Buona Mangiata-Prelude to Good Eating

Buona Mangiata-Good Eating

I'm on a journey to tediously translate an Italian cookbook I purchased over 20 years ago in Italy.  I don't speak Italian (except for the flawless pronunciation of every good Italian curse word.  And, trust me, there are some really good ones that make you feel so much better simply because you emphasize and linger on each syllable as if it were a song).

I digress.....the recipe book is called Scuola di Cucina by Simonetta Lupi Vada.  It's not available in English as far as I can tell.  I've looked.  Simonetta has others that were translated but I'm determined to work with this book because I bought it while browsing a bookstore in Italy with my dad.  He assured me that he could help me translate whatever I wanted.  Unfortunately, I put the book down for 20 years.  During that time, dad passed away.  I'm going to try to make up for lost time with Google translator.  Any translations and recipes that I successfully create from this book are dedicated to my dad.   Any failures will be chalked up to lousy translations or my own stupidity.  Cooking isn't hard.  It's a matter of reading a recipe.  I've failed countless times and each time it was because of misreading the recipe.  This time, I might have another excuse.....bad translation.   I promise to work on a recipe to get it right and to share the shortcomings or the bad translations along the way.  This might spare you unnecessary pain if you attempt to replicate noteworthy recipes.

This book caught my attention because it appeared to be a more authentic representation of regional Italian recipes than the dozens of other books I own.  There are 5 siblings in our family.  Based on our ancestry.com results, we appear to have more Italian blood pumping through our veins than most native Italians.  My dad spoke a fluent Napolitano dialect that was over 150 years old.  We found this out on a visit to Naples where he was wildly celebrated by local retailers as speaking a dialect that was almost extinct.  This was the result of his being a young tile setter in Washington, DC who worked alongside many older stone mason immigrants from rugged Southern Italy.  He was 20 and they were 75. By the time we traveled to Naples, dad was 80 years old.  So....the dialect was easily over 150 years old.   His dialect may have been dated but he had no trouble communicating.  Dad's love of food and everything Italian (including his well-known crush on Sophia Loren) came through in any conversation he had with locals and has lived on with each of his five children.  Authenticity is what I want and I'm hoping I've hit the mother-load with this book.

My mom and dad have 13 grandchildren and those children are busy working on the next generation.  We see the dilution of traditions and recipes with each successive generation.  Although we might not be able to stop this trend, we're going to try to revive a little bit of the love of food that we hope is genetic.   The value of this particular cookbook is that there are no 'short cuts'.  The ingredients aren't canned or processed.  It will be a pretty laborious effort to translate and cook even a portion of the 700+ pages.  However, I've already learned a few more words of Italian and hope to be totally fluent in reading Italian recipes by the time I'm done.  There could be more useless endeavors so I'm happy to indulge myself in this past-time.

There's one specific recipe that caught our attention 20 years ago in that bookstore so I'm eager to start with that one.   It was reminiscent of my dad's matriarchal sister who had already passed away at that time.  Dad saw the 'Rustic Spinach Pie' and declared..."now that one looks like Vienna's".  She took her special recipe with her when she died.  I don't really have high hopes that this one will hit the bulls-eye.  However,  one of the main ingredients is puff pastry.  With puff pastry, how can it be bad?

If this collection of recipes proves to be a close replication of some of the ones I recall as a young girl visiting relatives, I hope that family and friends will enjoy them.  Keep in mind that the serving sizes are not meant to be enjoyed by one person.  They are all meant to be shared around a large bountiful table with lots of love, wine and laughter.

So....for all of dad's children grand-children and great grand-children, I dedicate this to the man who loved to share his passion for food and cooking.  I hope you will come to appreciate the fact that the love that goes into cooking is the only special ingredient you will ever need.

Buona Mangiata