Looks a lot like the Danish Dough, doesn’t it? It’s made in much the same way with a few key differences both in ingredients and in how the butter is incorporated into the dough.
All-purpose and cake flours make up the most of the dry ingredients. Butter is cut in by hand and then a mixture of water and vinegar brings the dough together.
The resulting dough ball is wrapped and chilled.
In addition to preparing and chilling the dough, you must also prepare and chill a layered square of butter. To do this, you begin with four sticks of cold butter. The MSBH instructs to start with the sticks side by side but I have better luck when I space them out a bit.
Then you beat the butter sticks flat with a rolling pin (two sheets of floured parchment paper sandwich the butter during this process). I can never quite accomplish this without smashing my finger once or twice.
Through flattening, the cold butter becomes more and more malleable. It’s folded and smashed flat, folded and smashed flat, folded and smashed flat again.
After several goes at the smashing and the folding, you end up with a square of layered butter that is chilled for several hours in the fridge.
The chilled dough ball is carefully rolled out into something of a clover, or more like a lidless box with its sides cut apart and laid flat. The chilled square of butter is placed in the center. The MSBH has very clear, detailed instructions on how to accomplish all this and it’s pretty easy.
The four sides of the clover are folded up over the butter into a neat square package.
And now it’s just a matter of rolling out and folding up. Rolling out and folding up. Rolling out and folding up. Just like the Danish Dough.
Once all these steps are complete (it takes some time but is no big deal, really) you end up with about three pounds of puff pastry. Most of the MSBH recipes that call for puff pastry seem to require one pound so you can get about three MSBH recipes out of this one recipe for puff pastry dough. I weighed out even portions and wrapped them well in plastic wrap. Then I put them all in a freezer bag and popped them in the freezer until I’ll need to use them.
Recipes using puff pastry will be posted soon!
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