Puff pastry
 Puff pastry before baking, with layers clearly visible | |
| Alternative names | Détrempe, pâte feuilletée |
|---|---|
| Type | Pastry |
| Main ingredients | Butter or other solid culinary fat, flour, water |
Puff pastry, also known as pâte feuilletée, is a light, flaky pastry, its dough (détrempe) composed of wheat flour, butter or other solid fat (beurrage), and water. The butter is layered into the dough (or vice versa), making a paton. This is repeatedly rolled and folded, rested, re-rolled and folded, encasing solid butter between each resulting layer.
This produces a laminated dough. During baking, gaps form between the layers left by the fat melting; the pastry is leavened by steam from the water content of the fat as it expands, puffing the separate layers. The pastry layers crisp as the heated fat is in contact with its surfaces.
History
[edit]
Puff pastry also has a long history in Spain, perhaps through Arab or Moorish influences: the first known recipe of puff pastry using butter or lard and following the Arab technique of making each layer separately, appears in the Spanish recipe book Libro del arte de cozina (Book on the art of cooking) written by Domingo Hernández de Maceras and published in 1607.[1] Maceras, the head cook in one of the colleges of the University of Salamanca, already distinguished between filled puff pastry recipes and puff pastry tarts, and even mentions leavened preparations. Francisco Martínez Motiño, head chef to Philip II of Spain (1527–1598),[2] also gave several recipes of puff pastry in his Arte de cocina, pastelería, bizcochería y conservería published in 1611.[3] In this book, puff pastry is abundantly used, particularly to make savoury game pies.[4] In his novel El Buscón (published in 1627 but written in 1604), the Spanish writer Francisco de Quevedo caustically suggests that the puff pastry pies sold at the inn of some Simón de Paredes in Madrid were being adulterated with human flesh.[5]
The oldest known recipe for puff pastry in France was included in a charter by Robert, bishop of Amiens in 1311.[6] The first recipe to explicitly use the technique of tourage (the action of encasing solid butter within dough layers, keeping the fat intact and separate, by folding several times) was published in 1651 by François Pierre La Varenne in Le cuisinier français.[7][8] Modern French puff pastry was then developed and improved by the chef M. Feuillet and Antonin Carême.[9][10][11]
The earlier method is sometimes considered the idea of the famous painter Claude Gellée when he was an apprentice baker in 1612. Historical evidence for this is negligible, but is retained as culinary lore.[10] The story goes that Lorrain was making a type of very buttery bread for his sick father, and the process of rolling the butter into the bread dough created a croissant-like finished product.[12]
Production
[edit]
The production of puff pastry dough can be time-consuming, because it must be kept at a temperature of approximately 16 °C (60 °F) to keep shortening from becoming runny, and must rest in between folds to allow gluten strands time to link up and thus retain layering.
The number of layers in puff pastry is calculated with the formula:
where is the number of finished layers, the number of folds in a single folding move, and is how many times the folding move is repeated. For example, twice-folding (i.e. in three), repeated four times gives layers. Chef Julia Child recommends 73 layers for rough-puff pastry (pâte demi-feuilletée) and 729 (i.e. 36) layers for pâte feuilletée fine in her Mastering the Art of French Cooking.[13]: 174–180
Commercially made puff pastry is available in grocery stores. Common types of fat used include butter, vegetable shortenings, lard and margarine. Butter is the most common type used because it provides a richer taste and superior mouthfeel. Shortenings and lard have a higher melting point therefore puff pastry made with either will rise more than pastry made with butter, if made correctly. Puff pastry made in this manner will, however, often have a waxy mouthfeel and more bland flavor. Specialized margarine formulated for high plasticity (the ability to spread very thin without breaking apart) is used for industrial production of puff pastry.
Variants and distinctions
[edit]
Since the process of making puff pastry is generally laborious and time-intensive, faster recipes are fairly common: known as "blitz", "rough puff", or "flaky pastry".[14] Many of these recipes combine the butter into the détrempe rather than adding it in the folding process and are thus similar to a folded short crust.
Puff pastry can also be leavened with baker's yeast to create croissants, Danish pastry or pain au chocolat, though such preparations are not universally considered puff pastries.
Puff pastry differs from phyllo (filo) pastry, though puff pastry can be substituted for phyllo in some applications. Phyllo dough is made with flour, water, and fat and is stretched to size rather than rolled. When preparing phyllo dough, a small amount of oil or melted fat (usually butter) is brushed on one layer of dough and is topped with another layer, a process repeated as often as desired. When the phyllo bakes it becomes crispy, but since it contains somewhat less water, does not expand to the same degree as puff pastry. Puff pastry also differs from Austrian strudel dough, or strudelteig, which more closely resembles phyllo.
Uses
[edit]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Domingo Hernández de Maceras, cocinero en el Colegio mayor de Oviedo de la Ciudad de Salamanca. Libro del Arte de Cozina (PDF). Salamanca: Casa de Antonia Ramírez. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 September 2013. Retrieved 5 July 2011.
- ^ Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada Europeo-Americana, vol. 33, p.557, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1922. ISBN 9788423945009.
- ^ Martínez Montiño, Francisco, Arte de cocina, pastelería, bizcochería y conservería, Barcelona: Tusquets, 1982. ISBN 84-7223-425-8
- ^ Dionisio Pérez, (1929), «Guia del buen comer español», Madrid, Ed. Maxtor
- ^ "Empanada de carne de ahorcado, una delicia madrileña".
- ^ Maubourguet, Patrice; Flavigny, Laure, eds. (1996). Dictionnaire Larousse Gastronomique (in French). Larousse. pp. 455–457, 774–775. ISBN 978-2-03-507300-6. ISBN 2-03-507300-6
"Feuilletage" pp. 455–457: "La pâte feuilletée était déjà connue des Grecs et des Arabes, qui la préparaient à l'huile. Les croisés l'introduisirent en France et en Autriche. Dans une charte de Robert d'Amiens (1311), il est fait mention de « gâteaux feuilletés ». A la même époque, la ville de Cahors créait une spécialité de pâte feuilletée à l'huile, qu elle conserva longtemps. Les fleurons de feuilletage s'employaient déjà au XVe siècle à la cour du grand-duc de Toscane, pour orner les apprêts d'épinards. Le peintre Claude Gellée, dit le Lorrain (1600–1682), qui avait débuté comme apprenti pâtissier, passa longtemps pour l'« inventeur » – de la pâte feuilletée. Cette paternité lui fut disputée par un certain Feuillet, au nom prédestiné, pâtissier du prince de Condé, dont Antonin Carême parle élogieusement dans son Pâtissier royal." [...]
"Pâtisserie" p. 775: "Mais ce sont les Croisés qui, au XIe siècle, découvrent la canne à sucre et la pâte feuilletée en Orient, donnèrant une impulsion décisive à la pâtisserie proprement dite."
- ^ Robert, Frédéric; Ducasse, Alain (2006). Grand livre de cuisine: Alain Ducasse's desserts and pastries. Issy-les-Moulineaux, France; New York: Lec-Les Éditions Culinaires; Distributed by Stewart, Tabori & Chang. p. 507. ISBN 978-2848440163.
- ^ La Varenne (1651). Le cuisinier françois, enseignant la manière de bien apprester et assaisonner toutes sortes de viandes... légumes,... par le sieur de La Varenne,... (in French).
- ^ Carême, Marie-Antoine (1815). Le pâtissier royal parisien ou Traité élémentaire et pratique de la pâtisserie ancienne et moderne (in French). Vol. II. M. A. Carême (1784-1833): Auteur du texte.
- ^ a b Perry, Charles (June 1984). "Puff Paste is Spanish". Petits Propos Culinaires. 17: 57–62. doi:10.1558/ppc.29702.
- ^ Wemischner, Robert (2015). "pastry, puff". In Darra Goldstein (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. Oxford University Press. pp. 508–509. ISBN 978-0-19-931361-7.
- ^ Favre, Joseph (1905). "Feuilletage". Dictionnaire universel de cuisine pratique: Encyclopédie illustrée d'hygiène alimentaire — modification de l'homme par l'alimentation (in French). Vol. 3 (Deuxième majeure, révisée ed.). pp. 841–842 – via Gallica – Bibliothèque nationale de France.
- ^ Child, Julia; Beck, Simone (1978). "French Puff Pastry – Pâte Feuilletée" · "Pâte Demi-feuilletée Fine (simple, flaky, mock puff)" · "Pâte Feuilletée Fine (classic French puff)". Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Vol. 2. Penguin. pp. 164–180. ISBN 978-0-14-046221-0.
- ^ The Concise Household Encyclopedia (1935)
