What is Laminated Dough?

01/24/08

What is Laminated Dough?

Filed under: Blog, Mechanical— by joe @ 08:28:13 am Permalink

I'll admit it doesn't sound all that appetizing just to say it, lamination being a word that most people associate with driver's licenses, and further with a form of photography that makes an affable person of Scots-Irish descent look like a Columbian drug lord (though that just might be me).

Lamination is actually a word that means alternating layers. That of course can refer to plastic-paper-plastic lamination in the case of licenses (or my daughter's Barney Lovers of America Club ID card), or dough-butter-dough lamination in the case of puff pasty, flaky pastry, Danish or croissant dough.

Puff pastry, the purest of all of these forms of mechanical leavening, comprises 729 alternating layers of butter and dough. Some kinds have 2187. And while I know that sounds like a lot, it doesn't necessitate the rolling of two thousand separate dough sheets. Rather all it involves is but one more "turn" or folding of the dough, which...er, you'll see what I mean when I put up a few pictures (though as a cryptic hint I'll point out that 2187 is 729 times three).

How do laminated doughs work? Well, all of us know that puff pastries and other laminated doughs are a little (or a lot) on the rich side. In fact they can contain more butter than they do flour. This is a happy side benefit of the whole mechanical/laminated leavening strategy, which requires plenty of lubrication.

Imagine if you will a cross section of a piece of puff pastry, with all its layers of butter, interspersed with amazingly thin sheets of dough. Put that in a nice hot oven and some very interesting things will begin to happen. First, the butter will melt, creating gaps between the dough sheets, which at the same time will be starting to gel and toughen. As the heating continues, the water that's present in the dough (and to a lesser extent, the butter) starts to convert to steam. It collects in the gaps where the butter once was (before it melted) and begins pushing the layers apart. As the heat increases the dough layers become increasingly rigid, and the steam pushes them up, up, up. The end result can be a finished piece of pastry up to 10 times thicker than the one you started with.

But wait Joe, I thought you said steam takes up 1400 times as much space as the water it came from, why isn't my pastry twelve feet tall when it's done? The answer is of course because most of the steam escapes out the sides — but not before it creates a very light, to say nothing of rich and delectable, pastry.

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