Pate feuilletée
‘The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music and architecture, the principal branch of the latter being pâtisserie.’
Palmiers aux noisettes (Hazelnut palmiers)
Pâte feuilletée
( Puff pastry )
The puff pastry we are familiar with today is thought to be an adaptation of filo pastry, where layers of thin, unleavened buttered dough were stacked to make desserts such as baklava and strudel. The actual process of folding a dough around a block of butter to achieve those impossibly thin and flaky layers is credited to a seventeenth-century painter and pastry chef named Claude Gellée. Since then, puff pastry has infused every corner of French gastronomy, and in myriad forms: sweet, savoury, coated, filled, twisted — it’s the most versatile dough of all. As an added bonus, pâte feuilletée freezes very well raw, a privilege not afforded by any yeasted doughs.
Along with the dough for croissant, puff pastry is often considered one of the trickiest doughs to master, but I have actually always found it the least technically challenging of all bakers’ doughs. It consists of wrapping a base mixture of plain flour, salt and water (sometimes with the addition of melted butter) around a block of butter. What it does require, however, is time and a lot of elbow grease to achieve those amazingly thin and buttery layers so typical of puff pastry. The dough needs to be folded and laminated several times (turned), just as you would a croissant dough, except you have to do this for almost double the number of times. Unlike the dough for a croissant or Danish, which has a propensity to begin proving at room temperature (due to its yeast content) and is usually a softer, more fragile dough, puff pastry is made of a dry and stiff batter that does not stick or break easily during the laminating process. This is providing, of course, that you work patiently, allowing time between each ‘turn’ for the gluten to relax.