I’ll admit it doesn’t sound all that appetizing just to say it, reader Jo. Lamination is a word most people associate with driver’s licenses, though the word actually means “alternating layers”. Puff pastry is made of 729 alternating layers of butter and dough. Some people like theirs with 2187. And while that might sound like a lot, the difference between 729 layers and 2187 is but one more “turn” — or letter folding — of the dough.
READ ONVanilla slices are to Australia what chocolate chip cookies are to America, or at least that’s what I read on a promotional website sponsored by Pepperidge Farm. They’re less appealingly called “snot blocks” down under, but to me they look a lot like Napoleons (mille feuille), just with a very, VERY thick layer of pastry […]
READ ONPastry types just call it choux for short. The word literally means “cabbage” in French, and if you’re wondering how a pastry dough (batter, really) made of eggs, butter and flour ever got that name…I’ll tell you later.
Pastries made with choux dough are among the greatest exemplars of mechanical leavening known to the baking world. Should you be rusty on what exactly “mechanical leavening” means, it’s shorthand for steam power. Laminated doughs like puff pastry employ it, soufflés and angel food cakes employ it. Yet none of them achieve increases in volume like choux, a walnut-sized dollop of which will inflate to roughly the size of a lemon in the oven — and almost perfectly hollow to boot. No wonder people like to fill choux pastries up with things like whipped cream.
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Several readers have asked that I go a bit in-depth on egg washes. I’m happy to oblige, though I have to confess up front that I’m not a big believer in the alchemy of egg washes. Unless you’re very much into the minute details of presentation — and I’m clearly not — a simple wash made of well-beaten whole egg will do you for most any job. Multi-ingredient washes made from egg, cream, water with a dash of sugar…homey don’t play dat.
Making sure the egg really is well-beaten and not merely scrambled in the bowl is the real key to a good wash, i.e. one that gives you a smooth and even finish. Blobs of egg white on the brush will not only give you an uneven glaze, the pockets of albumen will actually prevent the wash from adhering to the pastry’s surface. I use a fork (sometimes a mini whisk) to mix up an egg wash. I whip briskly until I can’t force myself to do it any longer (about 2-3 minutes, which is a long time when you’re just standing there over a tiny bowl…whipping).
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Like a lot of sort-of laminated pastries, it’s hard to put your finger on just what it is that makes kringle so delicious. It’s not a croissant. It’s not a coffee cake. You think: it’s sort of like both of them but it has it own special, oh…I don’t know what. Then the plumped raisins and hints of cardamom kick in and well…you’re hooked.
READ ONLaminated pastry makers get hung up on numbers: 243, 729, 2187…the big multiples of three that you get when you fold a three-layer dough-butter-dough packet many times (2187 is the result of six letter-style tri-folds or “turns”). All those layers are what give laminated doughs their texture. Generally speaking the more layers you have in the dough the lighter, flakier and crunchier the finished product will be. Puff pastry has the most layers: 729 (5 turns) or 2187 (6 turns), croissant dough usually has the least: 81 (3 turns) or 108 (2 tri-fold turns plus one 4-ply “book” turn).
Kringle dough generally doesn’t appear in most laminated dough taxonomies since it’s the product of a mere two letter-style turns, which gives it only 27 layers. When the dough is baked up you scarcely know it’s laminated at all. The texture of the crumb is somewhere between a croissant and an enriched yeast dough (like brioche). This is what makes it unique, and also rather sneaky. You might call it semi-laminated.
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Under normal store-bought pastry circumstances palmiers are a very nice way to use up extra dough. When that dough is homemade, however, palmiers are poem-worthy. No other cookie is as light and lovely and delicious. Even “failed” puff pastry can find a welcome home in these delights. You can use whatever quantity of leftover dough you have. Roll it out into a rectangular sheet.
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In the long list of reasons why you should consider making your own puff pastry, vol-au-vent may not be number one (that distinction goes to cheese straws), number two (tarte tatin) or even three (Gâteau St. Honoré), but it’s definitely in the top five. It makes a killer first course to a dinner: light, buttery, crunchy and lovely to look at. Made with your own pastry it almost is almost as light as “a waft of wind”…which is what the name means in French.
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Reader Jayne wants to know how puff pastry can rise without any yeast, which is present in other laminated doughs like Danish and croissant. Jayne, I love your question and I thank you for asking it. The answer is: steam. Puff pastry needs no leavening agent because it’s comprised of hundreds and hundreds of individual layers of dough, all of them separated by layers of butter. When the pastry is inserted in the oven the butter melts, freeing and lubricating the dough sheets so they can separate from one another.
READ ON“Lifted by the breeze” or thereabouts. “A waft of wind” is more precise. The term is evocative of the ultra-light and airy puff pastry case. Ironically that case is all-too-often stuffed with an overly heavy filling. Worst case scenario, the pastry case itself is thick and heavy, and the whole thing sinks in the gut like the SS Carpathia after a couple of German torpedoes. All of which is to say that if you’ve never had a good vol-au-vent you’re in for a treat.
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