This Just In

I started by planning to make this early last week. Since I started my new job though, I ended up relegating it to this past Sunday. Since puff pastry from scratch is such a time consuming thing, it worked out because that’s literally all I did from midmorning on was work with this stuff. Well, I did laundry, swept, etc. inbetween turns, but you get the idea.

You’ll notice I am not providing a recipe here. I used a recipe for Small Batch Puff Pastry from The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Friberg. To Chef Friberg’s credit, this recipe is easy to follow, and the dough rolls out wonderfully. The combination of bread and cake flours produces a satin dough that is just luxurious. The process of “turning” is very well explained too.

What is not mentioned, however, is that it is an absolute must that uniform thickness be achieved when rolling out the dough to ensure a pastry that rises evenly in the oven. I don’t know if this is something that is found via trial and error as it was with me, but I can tell you that if that information would have been disclosed, it would have saved me an awful lot of frustration. The dough must be rolled to 1/8 inch thickness. Any thicker and the dough will puff up, but will not cook through.

I chose to make pastry diamonds. I figured “Go big or stay home”. Silly me! I guess I should have made turnovers, or stayed home. I nailed the cutting and folding technique for each pastry perfectly…but again, rolling the dough to the exact thickness was problematic. I also got eggwash on the sides of some of the pastry, which I think contributed to an uneven product.

I filled these with a raspberry paste (frozen raspberries, pushed through a sieve and thickened with King Arthur’s Signature Secrets Thickener) and pastry cream. I used Chef Friberg’s recipe for pastry cream, which I won’t do again, because he used whole eggs not just egg yolks, and it made the consistencey of the pastry cream kind of chunky, not smooth and velvety like my usual pastry cream.

You can see the uneven rise even better here.

This one (below) was one of the more acceptable pastries.

For all the uneven rising, uncooked dough layers and general poor appearance, these tasted really, really good the first day.

The next day however, they were absolutely disgusting. I mean yuck. I threw the remainder in the trash.

So to sum up, I don’t believe puff pastry from scratch is for me. It was an all day effort for very little end product. Thus no recipe to share with you. Save yourself the time, trouble and frustration and go with Pepperidge Farm or your favorite brand of frozen puff pastry. Faster, easier, more yield and flavor that’s just as good.

This is not to say I’m discouraged completely from breakfast pastries. The next thing I want to try is danish, using Chef Friberg’s cardamom danish dough. Some how I don’t think that one will be so bad.

S.