When I watched Julie and Julia a while ago, there was a scene when Amy Adams’s character expressed that when ‘the day there’s a meteorite heading toward the earth and we have thirty days to live, I am going to spend it eating butter’. Certainly not a good move for your cholesterol, but one cannot deny the pleasure butter can bring to your food. For a baker like me, butter is such a staple in many baking recipes, it seems inevitable that I will always have a supply of butter in my home. But what kind of bakes will allow you to showcase the beauty of butter the most? I would say it’s none other than some flaky, buttery puff pastry.
As a fellow blogger (Hi, terrepruitt! 😊) asked me about the puff pastry bakes on my cover photo a couple of days ago, it reminds of a period of time when I was desperately trying to master it at home. If one is to ask me if I have any tips on making puff pastry, my answer will be a simple one word: ‘patience’. Patience, patience, patience until you practically run out of patience by how many times I utter this word. The times I found myself struggling with the lamination of the pastry are often times when I rushed it. A good puff pastry can take up to several hours to make with constant procedures of rolling, folding, chilling and resting in and out of the fridge. It’s one LONG process (which does make me appreciate that some of you might just decide to save the effort and buy ready-made puff pastry from the supermarket altogether 😜). For those of you who don’t have much patience like me, there is an easy alternative though. And this is rough puff pastry.
So what is rough puff pastry? It is basically a cheating method of achieving puff pastry without the long lamination process. A rough puff pastry takes less than an hour to make as opposed to several hours for a full puff pastry. Only will you get the same signature flakiness in the pastry, but it also tastes just as good! The only one downside is that because you have no defined layers in your rough puff pastry, it will not rise as high as the full puff pastry would. But, this still means that rough puff pastry still can be used in a vast array of recipes – sweet AND savoury!
The recipe I used for the rough puff pastry is by Gordon Ramsay and can be found on the BBC Good Food website. (Link: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2403/roughpuff-pastry-)
What other ideas do you have for using puff pastry? Feel free to share with me in the comments!
Tango's Baking 