More Fun with Puff Pastry and the Daring Bakers

Vols-au-Vent

Mille-Feuille

I was so excited to see puff pastry as this month's Daring Baker's challenge! I absolutely loved all the puff pastry goods I made at my pastry class last month, and this was a great opportunity to try even more. Cakes are definitely my comfort zone, and I've always thought of pastry as being so much more time consuming, but it's really not! I did all 6 turns of the dough in one evening in about two hours, including chilling time, while I regularly spend at least 6 hours on a cake. And it tastes SO good! I'll definitely be getting out the rolling pin a lot more often from now on - although my golden retriever Tsuki was definitely looking at me very strangely as I attacked the butter with my rolling pin.

This recipe was from Julia Child, and was a little different than the recipe we used at ICE. We did 6 turns, rather than 4, and each turn resulted in 3 layers rather than the 4 we did at ICE. Both recipes yielded wonderful results!

I used one-third of the dough for the vols-au-vent filled with a chocolate pastry cream, and the other two-thirds for mille-feuille filled with a Nutella pastry cream. Puff pastry is now up there on my list of favorite desserts (and I really am a cake girl!), it was really that delicious!

I'm so happy to finally be one with my rolling pin.


The September 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.

Recipe for Puff Pastry:

Michel Richard’s Puff Pastry Dough

From: Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan
Yield: 2-1/2 pounds dough

There is a wonderful on-line video from the PBS show “Baking with Julia” that accompanies the book. In it, Michel Richard and Julia Child demonstrate making puff pastry dough (although they go on to use it in other applications). They do seem to give slightly different ingredient measurements verbally than the ones in the book…I listed the recipe as it appears printed in the book. http://video.pbs.org/video/1174110297/search/Pastry

Ingredients:
2-1/2 cups (12.2 oz/ 354 g) unbleached all-purpose flour
1-1/4 cups (5.0 oz/ 142 g) cake flour
1 tbsp. salt (you can cut this by half for a less salty dough or for sweet preparations)
1-1/4 cups (10 fl oz/ 300 ml) ice water
1 pound (16 oz/ 454 g) very cold unsalted butter

plus extra flour for dusting work surface

Mixing the Dough:

Check the capacity of your food processor before you start. If it cannot hold the full quantity of ingredients, make the dough into two batches and combine them.

Put the all-purpose flour, cake flour, and salt in the work bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade and pulse a couple of times just to mix. Add the water all at once, pulsing until the dough forms a ball on the blade. The dough will be very moist and pliable and will hold together when squeezed between your fingers. (Actually, it will feel like Play-Doh.)

Remove the dough from the machine, form it into a ball, with a small sharp knife, slash the top in a tic-tac-toe pattern. Wrap the dough in a damp towel and refrigerate for about 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, place the butter between 2 sheets of plastic wrap and beat it with a rolling pin until it flattens into a square that's about 1" thick. Take care that the butter remains cool and firm: if it has softened or become oily, chill it before continuing.

Incorporating the Butter:

Unwrap the dough and place it on a work surface dusted with all-purpose flour (A cool piece of marble is the ideal surface for puff pastry) with your rolling pin (preferably a French rolling pin without handles), press on the dough to flatten it and then roll it into a 10" square. Keep the top and bottom of the dough well floured to prevent sticking and lift the dough and move it around frequently. Starting from the center of the square, roll out over each corner to create a thick center pad with "ears," or flaps.

Place the cold butter in the middle of the dough and fold the ears over the butter, stretching them as needed so that they overlap slightly and encase the butter completely. (If you have to stretch the dough, stretch it from all over; don't just pull the ends) you should now have a package that is 8" square.

Dough/Butter Package

To make great puff pastry, it is important to keep the dough cold at all times. There are specified times for chilling the dough, but if your room is warm, or you work slowly, or you find that for no particular reason the butter starts to ooze out of the pastry, cover the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate it . You can stop at any point in the process and continue at your convenience or when the dough is properly chilled.

Making the Turns:

Gently but firmly press the rolling pin against the top and bottom edges of the square (this will help keep it square). Then, keeping the work surface and the top of the dough well floured to prevent sticking, roll the dough into a rectangle that is three times as long as the square you started with, about 24" (don't worry about the width of the rectangle: if you get the 24", everything else will work itself out.) With this first roll, it is particularly important that the butter be rolled evenly along the length and width of the rectangle; check when you start rolling that the butter is moving along well, and roll a bit harder or more evenly, if necessary, to get a smooth, even dough-butter sandwich (use your arm-strength!).

With a pastry brush, brush off the excess flour from the top of the dough, and fold the rectangle up from the bottom and down from the top in thirds, like a business letter, brushing off the excess flour. You have completed one turn.

Rotate the dough so that the closed fold is to your left, like the spine of a book. Repeat the rolling and folding process, rolling the dough to a length of 24" and then folding it in thirds. This is the second turn.

Chilling the Dough:

If the dough is still cool and no butter is oozing out, you can give the dough another two turns now. If the condition of the dough is iffy, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes. Each time you refrigerate the dough, mark the number of turns you've completed by indenting the dough with your fingertips. It is best to refrigerate the dough for 30 to 60 minutes between each set of two turns.

The total number of turns needed is six. If you prefer, you can give the dough just four turns now, chill it overnight, and do the last two turns the next day. Puff pastry is extremely flexible in this regard. However, no matter how you arrange your schedule, you should plan to chill the dough for at least an hour before cutting or shaping it.

(Allie: I did all 6 turns in one evening, then put all the dough in the fridge for a few days. I made the vols-au-vent one evening with a third of the dough, then put the rest in the freezer (unrolled) for another week. After defrosting the dough in the fridge for almost one day, I made the mille-feuille.)

Steph’s extra tips:

-Keep things cool by using the refrigerator as your friend! If you see any butter starting to leak through the dough during the turning process, rub a little flour on the exposed dough and chill straight away. Although you should certainly chill the dough for 30 to 60 minutes between each set of two turns, if you feel the dough getting to soft or hard to work with at any point, pop in the fridge for a rest.

-Not to sound contradictory, but if you chill your paton longer than the recommended time between turns, the butter can firm up too much. If this seems to be the case, I advise letting it sit at room temperature for 5-10 minutes to give it a chance to soften before proceeding to roll. You don't want the hard butter to separate into chuncks or break through the dough...you want it to roll evenly, in a continuous layer.

-Roll the puff pastry gently but firmly, and don’t roll your pin over the edges, which will prevent them from rising properly. Don't roll your puff thinner than about about 1/8 to 1/4-inch (3-6 mm) thick, or you will not get the rise you are looking for.

-Try to keep “neat” edges and corners during the rolling and turning process, so the layers are properly aligned. Give the edges of the paton a scooch with your rolling pin or a bench scraper to keep straight edges and 90-degree corners.

-Brush off excess flour with a pastry brush before turning dough and after rolling.

-Make clean cuts. Don’t drag your knife through the puff or twist your cutters too much, which can inhibit rise.

-When egg washing puff pastry, try not to let extra egg wash drip down the cut edges, which can also inhibit rise.

-Extra puff pastry dough freezes beautifully. It’s best to roll it into a sheet about 1/8 to 1/4-inch thick (similar to store-bought puff) and freeze firm on a lined baking sheet. Then you can easily wrap the sheet in plastic, then foil (and if you have a sealable plastic bag big enough, place the wrapped dough inside) and return to the freezer for up to a few months. Defrost in the refrigerator when ready to use.

-You can also freeze well-wrapped, unbaked cut and shaped puff pastry (i.e., unbaked vols-au-vent shells). Bake from frozen, without thawing first.

-Homemade puff pastry is precious stuff, so save any clean scraps. Stack or overlap them, rather than balling them up, to help keep the integrity of the layers. Then give them a singe “turn” and gently re-roll. Scrap puff can be used for applications where a super-high rise is not necessary (such as palmiers, cheese straws, napoleons, or even the bottom bases for your vols-au-vent).

For the Vols-au-vent:

Egg Wash: Whisk one egg in a small bowl.

On a lightly floured surface, roll one-third of the puff pastry dough into a rectangle about 1/8 to 1/4-inch (3-6 mm) thick. Transfer it to a baking sheet and refrigerate for about 10 minutes before proceeding with the cutting.

Use a 1.5" cookie cutter to cut out rounds from the dough. (Save any scrap by stacking—not wadding up—the pieces…they can be re-rolled and used if you need extra dough. If you do need to re-roll scrap to get enough disks, be sure to use any rounds cut from it for the bases, not the ring-shaped sides.)

Using a ¾"-inch cutter, cut centers from half of the rounds to make rings. These rings will become the sides of the vols-au-vent, while the solid disks will be the bottoms. You can either save the center cut-outs to bake off as little “caps” for you vols-au-vent, or put them in the scrap pile.

Dock the solid bottom rounds with a fork (prick them lightly, making sure not to go all the way through the pastry) and lightly brush them with egg wash. Place the rings directly on top of the bottom rounds and very lightly press them to adhere. Brush the top rings lightly with egg wash, trying not to drip any down the sides (which may inhibit rise). If you are using the little “caps,” dock and egg wash them as well.

Refrigerate the assembled vols-au-vent on the lined baking sheet while you pre-heat the oven to 400ºF. (You could also cover and refrigerate them for a few hours at this point.)

Once the oven is heated, remove the sheet from the refrigerator and place a silicon baking mat (preferred because of its weight) or another sheet of parchment over top of the shells. This will help them rise evenly. Bake the shells until they have risen and begin to brown, about 10-15 minutes depending on their size. Reduce the oven temperature to 350ºF (180ºC), and remove the silicon mat or parchment sheet from the top of the vols-au-vent. If the centers have risen up inside the vols-au-vent, you can gently press them down. Continue baking (with no sheet on top) until the layers are golden, about 15-20 minutes more. (If you are baking the center “caps” they will likely be finished well ahead of the shells, so keep an eye on them and remove them from the oven when browned.)

Remove to a rack to cool. Cool to room temperature.

Fill with chocolate pastry cream (recipe below), and serve.

Recipe for Chocolate Pastry Cream can be found here.




Recipe for Nutella Pastry Cream: Follow the recipe above for chocolate pastry cream, but replace the 3 ounced melted chocolate with 1/2 cup Nutella.

For the Mille-Feuilles: (makes 8 servings)

Divide 2/3 of the puff pastry into two equal pieces. Roll each piece into a rectangle, approximately 12" x 18". Lay the dough on a piece of parchment paper on a half sheet pan or cookie sheet and refrigerate for one hour.

Dock the dough (prick all over with a fork), and cover with another piece of parchment. Place another cookie sheet or half sheet pan on top of the parchment paper (the extra weight will keep the dough from puffing too much). Bake for 35-40 minutes at 350, rotating the pans every 10 minutes or so. The pastry should be a rich golden color. Cool completely.

Use a ruler to cut each rectangle into 3 equal strips. Cut each strip into 3 equal strips.

Assembling the mille-feuille:

Each serving uses 3 strips of pastry. Brush 2 of the 3 strips with melted chocolate, and top with Nutella pastry cream. Place the final strip of pastry on top, and dust with powdered sugar. You can refrigerate the pastry for a few hours before serving, but it will taste best if you serve immediately.

*Thanks to Ed for taking a few of the vols-au-vent pics!

Mille Feuille with Chocolate Pastry Cream

Chocolate Mille-Feuille

Ok, this is my last post about the ICE pastry class, I promise (that class anyway, I'm taking another in October)! Mille-Feuille means 1000 sheets in French, because after all the folding you do with the puff pastry dough, you have nearly 1000 layers in the end. When I was in Paris in July, Pierre Herme had a new dessert called the Deux Mille Feuille - 2000 layers! I'm not sure if he really did double the customary number of folds, but it was one of the best things I've ever eaten: perfectly flaky caramelized puff pastry filled with praline and praline pastry cream (here is a picture). Ana and I had planned to do a coffee pastry cream with chocolate sauce drizzled on top, but we didn't have the espresso powder on hand that day, so we settled for chocolate instead. It was delicious, and I'll definitely be making it again. Next time, I'll try the fondant glaze on top - Fanny at Foodbeam has a great tutorial here. And I was really amazed that I could cut it without ruining it after it was chilled for a couple of hours!

I had always thought of dough as taking a lot more time and being more tedious than cakes, but after my week of pastry, I think I'll be getting out the rolling pin a lot more often these days. I've already made another batch of the classic puff pastry since class ended, and I did all 6 turns of the dough in less than 2 hours - much less time than I spend on a layer cake.

I've been looking up laws about getting my kitchen licensed so that I can start selling some of my baked goods, and apparently there's this distinction between PHF's (potentially hazardous foods) and non-PHF's, and pastry cream falls into the PHF category. Residential kitchens are not allowed to prepare (for sale) PHF's. This makes me really sad, because I can totally imagine catering some sort of party and putting cream puffs or eclairs or mille-feuilles on the menu... I wonder if there's a loophole somewhere. Please let me know if you have any more info on this topic!

Ok, time for the first faculty meeting of the year. Hopefully there won't be too much bad news in the budget discussions...


Recipe for Mille-Feuille (aka Napoleon)

1 batch quick puff pastry (or 1/2 batch classic puff pastry)
chocolate pastry cream (recipe below)
slivered almonds to decorate

Roll the puff pastry into two rectangles, approximately 12" by 18" each. Slide onto parchment lined baking sheets, and refrigerate about an hour to let the dough rest.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Dock the dough (that is, use a fork or pastry docker to poke holes all over the dough). Place another sheet of parchment paper on top of the dough, and then top with another sheet pan or cookie sheet. The extra weight will help keep the dough from puffing.

Bake for about 30 minutes, turning the pan often. The dough should be very golden when done. Cool between the pans to keep the pastry from warping. No matter how perfect your original rectangle was, the dough has probably changed shape while baking - this is why it's best to cut the dough after baking rather than before.

When the pastry is cool, carefully trim each piece to a perfect rectangle with a serrated knife; use as little pressure as possible as the pastry is extremely delicate. Next trim each of the two rectangles into three strips that are exactly the same size (you may need to re-trim some of the pieces to make them the same size). You'll make two large Mille-Feuilles, each with three layers of puff pastry.

Place one strip of puff pastry on a plate or piece of cardboard. Spread a thick layer of pastry cream on top, and top with a second layer of puff pastry. Spread a thick layer of pastry cream on top of the second layer, and top with the third strip of puff pastry. Smooth the sides of the pastry, and press slivered almonds on the sides if desired. Dust the top of the pastry with powdered sugar. Repeat with the remaining three strips of puff pastry and pastry cream.

To serve, slice each mille-feuille into narrow rectangles. It will be much easier to cut after refrigerating for 2 hours. (Alternatively, you could slice the pastry into small servings before decorating with almonds and powdered sugar.)

Recipe for Chocolate Pastry Cream

2 cups milk
1/4 cup cornstarch
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
4 egg yolks
4 tablespoons butter (1/2 stick), cut into several small pieces
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 ounces semisweet chocolate, melted

Dissolve cornstarch in 1/2 cup of the milk. Combine the remaining milk with the sugar in a saucepan, and bring to a boil. Remove from heat.

Beat the eggs and yolks into the cornstarch mixture. Slowly pour the milk/sugar mixture into the egg mixture, whisking constantly (you don't want to cook the eggs). Strain.

Return to heat (medium/high flame), and continue whisking until the cream thickens. After the cream comes to a boil (little blips, not an active boil), cook one more minute. Your arm will feel like it's going to fall off at this point!

Remove from heat, and stir in the butter and vanilla and melted chocolate. Cool in the refrigerator or over an ice bath. The ice bath will cool the cream more quickly.

Pastry Class at the Institute of Culinary Education - Part 2

Fruit Strip

I'm sitting outside in Saratoga, drinking iced tea, taking a break from course prep, and enjoying my last few days of summer. I so love the atmosphere of a good coffee shop, especially one with outdoor seating. The weather is perfect. The only thing missing is my dog - I left her at my mom's because I wasn't sure I'd be able to find us an outdoor seat. My local coffee shop at home is my home away from home, and my students all know I'm more likely to be found there than my actual office. I'm really more productive there than I am at my office - and with a laptop, wireless internet, and cell phone, who really needs an office these days?

But back to pastry class... days 4 and 5 were puff pastry, strudel dough, and phyllo dough... so much fun!

Our ICE Kitchen Classroom

We made both the quick puff pastry and classic puff pastry. I didn't do as thorough of a taste test as I would have liked, but I'm not sure I could discern a huge difference in taste between the two. The quick version was, unsurprisingly, much quicker than the traditional version, so I'll probably make that one more often - but the classic was so much fun and really made me feel like a baker, so I'll make that again too.

Puff pastry is not quick. My partner Ana and I ended up working straight through the lunch break in order to make everything on the menu: mille feuille (aka Napoleon), palmiers (aka elephant ears), almond sugar straws, and a puff pastry fruit strip. All of it tasted amazing - perfectly light and flaky and delicious. A lot of my classmates thought the texture was completely changed (for the worse) by the following morning, but I swear they tasted good for several more days. Sure, they might not have been perfect, but they were still better than a lot of pastries you can find for sale these days. I froze some of the straws and palmiers, and wonder if they'll still be good after thawing and re-crisping in the oven. I freeze cakes all the time, frosted and unfrosted, and it would be great if I could freeze pastry too. At the very least, I'm told that freezing the unbaked puff pastry works very well.


Recipe for Quick Puff Pastry (adapted from ICE)

20 tablespoons (2 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter
1/2 cup cold water
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups unbleached all purpose flour

Dice 2 sticks butter into 1/4" - 1/2" cubes; chill.

Whisk salt into flour.

Coarsely chop remaining 4 tablespoons butter. Put this butter and flour/salt into the food processor and pulse until butter is absorbed - about 10-12 one-second pulses. Add the remaining 2 sticks of butter (already diced), and pulse once or twice to distribute. Add water and pulse 3-4 times, just until dough begins to form a rough ball. You want big bits of butter remaining; do not over-process.

Shape dough into a rough rectangle on top of a lightly floured piece of plastic wrap. Lightly flour the dough, and top with another piece of plastic wrap. Press the dough with rolling pin to flatten, and then roll dough into roughly a 12" x 18" rectangle. Work quickly so the butter doesn't melt.

Peel away top piece of plastic wrap and invert the dough onto a floured work surface. Peel off the remaining piece of plastic wrap. Fold the dough in thirds, like you're folding a piece of paper to place in a business-size envelope. You should now have roughly a 4" x 18" piece of dough, with three layers.

Roll up the dough from one of the smaller ends, tucking the end underneat the dough at the end. Press the dough into a square, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for 1 hour or until firm (overnight is fine).


The classic puff pastry is for you if you've had a bad day and can't get to a kickboxing class. You make a dough with flour, butter, salt, and water (I'll put up a detailed recipe for puff pastry in another post). Now, you need to make the butter (4 sticks!) into roughly the same size and shape as the dough, but you need to keep it cold so you can't use your hands. Solution? Take your versatile rolling pin, and whack the hell out of your butter until it gets soft! Seriously. After a few minutes of pounding, you can use your hand to quickly shape the dough into a small square, slightly smaller than the dough. Then you wrap the dough around the butter, and do some more rolling and folding over the next 24 hours or so... just so you feel a little better about the 4 sticks of butter, the classic puff pastry makes about twice as much dough as the quick puff pastry recipe above.

Sacristains (aka Almond Sugar Puff Pastry Straws)

Recipe for Sacristains (from ICE):

1 batch quick puff pastry (or 1/2 batch classic puff pastry)
egg wash (whisk together 1 egg with a pinch of salt)
3/4 cup ground almonds
1/2 cup sugar

Roll dough out to form a rectangle, about 3/16" thick. Brush with egg wash.

Stir together the ground almonds and sugar. Scatter the almond and sugar mixture evenly over the dough. Roll the rolling pin over the dough to press the toppings into the dough slightly.

Allow the dough to rest in refrigerator for 1 hour (you can skip this step if you're in a really big hurry). Cut into 1/2" wide strips - a pizza cutter works well for this. Twist each strip into a corkscrew shape. Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake at 375°F for 15 minutes or until golden brown. These are best served on the day they are baked.

We made an amazing mille feuille and some other things as well. I'll put the mille feuille (a Napoleon) in the next post.

On Day 5, we made strudel (both sweet and savory) and then several things with phyllo dough. Butter was the theme of the day. It turns out that, like the puff pastry dough, strudel dough is a good thing to make when you need to get out some agression. After you bring the dough together, you slap it (hard!) against the table 100 times before it's ready to roll. This activates the gluten which allows it to be stretched so far.

Apple Strudel

Recipe for Strudel Dough (from ICE)

3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (plus more for oiling dough)
warm water

Combine the flour and salt in a large mixing bowl.

Beat the eggs and oil with a fork in a 2-cup measure (so worth buying if you don't have one, but any liquid measure which hold at least 1 1/4 cups will do). Add enough warm water to make a total of 1 1/4 cup.

Stir the liquid into the flour with a rubber spatula or your fingers, making sure no flour stick to the side of the bowl. The dough should be fairly soft.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and knead gently to begin developing the gluten. Pick the dough up and slam it (hard!) against the surface 100 times, kneading and folding occasionally. The dough should not be smooth and elastic and no longer sticky.

Oil a small bowl and place the dough in the bowl, turning it over so that it is completely covered with oil. Press plastic wrap against the surface of the dough and let it rest at room temperature for about an hour or more. If it will be resting more than 12 hours, place the dough in the refrigerator (and let come to room temperature before continuing).

Time to stretch!! Cover a rectangular table (30" x 48" or bigger preferably) with a cloth, and flour the cloth generously. Place the dough in the center, and flour it lightly. Be sure that the dough is still smooth and that it didn't get folded as you removed it from the bowl. Roll it as thinly as possible with your rolling pin. Brush oil over the entire surface of the dough.

Dough is rolled as big as possible, then brushed with oil.

Preferably with at least one other person, pull the dough from the center outward, stretching it over the backs of your hands, fingers folded under. Keep stretching the dough until it's very thin - you want to be able to read paper through it. Some holes are ok.

Stretching the dough

Trim the very edges of the dough which are probably a little thicker than the rest. Let the dough dry for 5-10 minutes.

After stretching the dough, brush the entire surface with butter, and sprinkle about 1/3 cup of bread crumbs on top.

Fill the strudel with your desired filling. Here, apple strudel is on the left and topfen cheese strudel is on the right.

Roll up the strudel using the table cloth. Fold in (and occasionally trip) the ends as you roll.


Brush the strudel with butter. If you're using the entire strudel dough for one strudel, you will need to shape it into a horse-shoe shape to fit on the baking sheet. If you split it into two strudels, each will fit diagonally on one half sheet pan.

Bake the strudel at 400°F for about 40 minutes. If the pastry begins to take on too much color, lower the oven temperature to 350°F and cover the strudel loosely with foil.

Let cool completely. Dust with powdered sugar.

Apple Strudel - all done!

There are lots of options for filling your strudel. Click here to see the apple strudel recipe that the Daring Bakers made in May, as well as a different recipe for strudel dough.