Recipe Easy Homemade Puff Pastry Dough

[MypinchofItaly]

This is a neutral puff pasty dough, it suits as good as both sweet and savoury preparations.
However, if you want it slightly sweet, you can add 1 teaspoon of sugar to the sifted flour and mix well. Ditto for the savoury one, add a teaspoon of salt.

You can also use wholemeal or gluten-free flour, depending on your necessity, by replacing white flour completely or half and half.

Doses for 3 ounces of puff pastry.
(Quantity suitable for making 1 savoury tart), Preparation time 40 mins

• 100 g frozen unsalted butter
• 175 g Italian flour 00 or 0 or Plain flour/All Purpose flour
• cold water, to taste

Method

Freeze the butter.
Wrap it butter in aluminium foil and place it in the freezer for 30 minutes. Only if it is well hardened it can be grated without problems.

Flour should always be sifted. Sieve it and let it fall into a large and capacious bowl. By sifting the flour and letting it fall from above, we will be able to incorporate all the air that the dough will need to swell during cooking.

Take off butter from the freezer, be careful to take it from the side of the aluminium foil because the heat from fingers would melt it easily.

Keep the grater dipped directly into the flour and start grating the butter, so that the butter will not stick to it.

While you’re grating the butter, start stirring the ingredients until you get a rather lumpy mixture.

Tip: try not using hands in this phase because they would melt the butter compromising the result.

Add a tablespoon of cold tap water. Start with just a tablespoon, keep working the dough with a spatula as if you’d cut it rather than mix it. Add water until the mixture begins to compact, but without being sticky.

Now use your hands. Quickly, form a ball. A little more water may be needed if the dough should crumble.

As soon as the dough is ready, wrap it in clingfilm or in a food plastic bag and store it in the fridge at least 30 mins.

Now it’s ready to be rolled out by using two sheets of baking paper so that you can roll it out better.

 

[Morning Glory]

This is what I know as flaky pastry except that it would be folded and rolled and rested several times to form layers. I'm curious as to how the pastry forms layers without doing the 'lamination'. Coincidentally I was going to post the method for rough puff - which uses chunks of butter and folding & rolling - but is much easier than traditional puff pastry. Here is some I made:

 

[MrsDangermouse]

This is what I know as flaky pastry except that it would be folded and rolled and rested several times to form layers. I'm curious as to how the pastry forms layers without doing the 'lamination'.

Your flaky pastry looks a lot like the suet pastry I make for pies, and my suet pastry is exactly the same method as MypinchofItaly's (except the suet is already in pellet form so there's no need to grate it). I don't know how the layers form without folding and rolling, but they do! Its nowhere near as puffy as puff pastry of course, but its much quicker