The Adam Method?

Reader Adam submits this ingenious tip for rolling pastry in hot weather:

I’d like to share a tip I just discovered myself while making puff pastry. I’m living in Israel and now its the beginning of summer and starting to get pretty hot. This kind of weather makes it a bit difficult to roll out puff pastry as the butter soften very quickly. So in order to make it easier what I did was to pull out one of my fridge shelves and use it as a rolling surface. The shelf is made of tempered glass and since it’s cold – out of the fridge, it keeps the dough chill throughout the lamination process. It also feels pretty comfortable to work on a glass surface and since I have a tiny kitchen it gives me freedom to move the surface around or rotate it to the most comfortable position for rolling. When I finish a lamination session I just put the shelf back in the fridge with the flour and all. And at the end of the process I clean it and put it back in the fridge. I find this method very useful also for pie crust.

Another thing, I heard there’s another faster method for making puff pastry do you know about it? can you tell if it’s worth trying and is the result any different?

Great stuff, Adam! Thanks. As for the “quick method” for making laminated pastry, if it’s the one I’m familiar with, it simply involves cutting the cold butter up into pieces and folding those into the dough. It’s works well, though to my mind not as well as the standard “butter pat” method, which only takes a little longer and creates a higher-rising dough.