Puff Pastry: The Anytime Suitable Delight #PastryRecipesWorldwide
Puff pastry is a light and flaky baked product. In its unbaked form, it contains many layers of dough, which are repeatedly rolled over and folded to prepare these pastries. It is best that you do not mash the dough, as it could spoil the pastries.
These pastries are often also called water dough. Gaps are formed in-between the layers when the pastry is baked in the oven. Piercing is done to reduce excessive rising of the pastry, while the pastries are being baked.
Puff pastries are commercially sold in many grocery stores. The most common types of fats used are vegetable oils, butter and lard. Butter is most widely used, as it provides much superior taste. Other types of fats give it a very waxy feel and the flavour is often bland too. The butter layer is what causes the rise in the pastry.
Preparing this pastry can be quite time-consuming and laborious.
Hence, many recipes that can be prepared faster like rough puff, blitz and flaky pastry are very common. Instead of folding butter in layers, it is combined into the detrempe in these recipes. Hence, they taste like folded short crust.
Puff pastry also has many variants. It can be leavened with baker's yeast to make delicious croissants. Many other forms like Danish pastries are also possible. Puff pastries are generally very famous in French cuisines.
A typical puff pastry is about 6 to 8 times its pre-baking height. For household manufacturing, defrosting of the pastry dough for a few hours before production is a very good idea, as these pastries demand cooler temperature for production. The final pastries can be of a variety of shapes.
The Production
The production can often be very time consuming, as the dough has to be necessarily kept at a temperature of 16 °C. It also should rest in between the folds to prevent the strands of gluten (a kind of protein found in breads) to join and retain layering. The number of layers in a puff pastry can be calculated with the formula: l = (f + 1)n where l is the number of finished layers, f is the number of folds and n refers to the number of times there have been folds given to the dough.
Generally, the ingredients used in the production of puff pastries are flour, salt, cold water, fat content like butter, eggs for glazing (or any other glazing material). The main rule of production is to create many layers of ingredients like butter and dough by turning and folding the two together. The butter should not melt while the pastry is being made. Therefore, it is very important that the baker works very quickly, more so if the kitchen is hot.
Professional chefs, who make pastries often use a refrigerated (or cooled by other means) marble. A pastry that is evenly layered requires that the thickness of the entire pastry should be same and edges should be straight. There can be a variety of flavours of puff pastry like pear, strawberries and vegetable pastries.
Source: Mr. Pratap Shanbhag
