Puff pastry, the big “puff daddy” of pastries, is sometimes called the “queen of all pastries”. In French, pâte feuilletée (paht fuh-yuh-TAY) means “leaved” or “leafy”, and literally translates to flaky pastry. However, paste is what I found to be the case during my first two attempts, not puff paste!

Why make homemade puff pastry when you can buy store-bought? It’s a challenge, but it tastes better, richer. Also, many store varieties use hydrogenated fat instead of real butter. However, by making it at home, you can control what fat goes into your puff pastry. In France, you can buy beurre sec, which is a dry butter that has a low moisture content, but a high fat content and therefore doesn’t melt as fast. The butter in Canada and the U.S. has more moisture. If possible, try to locate European (or European-style) butter. If that’s not possible, try to find the hardest butter in your supermarket by using the finger test!

Puff pastry is used in both sweet (such as shells for tarts, napoleons, palmiers, Danishes, strudels, and turnovers) and savory dishes (such as croissants, cheese straws, beef wellington, salmon en croûte and pâté en croûte, and vol-au-vents). Although my allumettes were fatter than matchsticks, I tried making puff pastry strips again using a more matchstick shape.

What separates puff pastry from regular pastry is the layers. Layers of dough and butter are carefully combined so as to make a pastry with exactly 729 layers.

The layering is accomplished through turning (also called lamination). Lamination means sandwiching something between layers, in this case dough-butter-dough. Each rolling and folding is called a turn. Classic puff pastry is turned 6 times. If each turn creates 3 layers, that means 3 to the 6th power which equals 729 layers of butter between 730 layers of dough. I love Google! When I typed “3 to the 6th” in the Google search bar, this is what it showed:
Puff pastry depends on these 729 thin layers to hold the steam and puff up. Puff pastry is sometimes called Mille feuilles, or a thousand leaves. This is because there are 730 layers of dough and 729 layers of butter. If you add these together, you get 1457 layers.

If all goes well, the layers of butter alternate with the layers of dough. In the oven, as the butter melts, the dough absorbs the flavour, and steam is generated. This evaporation pushes the layers apart, making a buttery and flaky pastry with many layers.

A big key to making puff pastry is keeping the dough and butter cold, around 60°F. This means patience, which I don’t tend to have a lot of. After a couple of attempts at making this pastry, I decided given that our home is warmer than it should be given the wintry weather outside, I needed to do one turn and then put it back in the refrigerator. This helped avoid the situation of having the butter seep through the dough causing a big sticky mess.

Use a cold, marble slab, if you can. I don’t have that, so I filled a large bowl with ice water and put it on the counter where I would be rolling out the dough. This helped keep the counter cool. You could also put a cookie sheet in the freezer and then use it to work with the dough.

Recipe: Puff Pastry 

1½ cups all-purpose flour
¾ cup cake and pastry flour
1 teaspoon salt
⅔ to ¾ cup cold water (up to 1 cup)
2 tablespoons (1 ounce) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
14 tablespoons (7 ounces) unsalted butter
1 large egg, slightly beaten, for glazing

You can find the recipe in Le Cordon Bleu at Home (affiliate link).

Recipe: Cheese Straws