Rough puff pastry

Recipe

Puff pastry - Preppy Kitchen

^ I doubled the recipe to use a whole block of butter and to have extra dough in the freezer.

How it turned out

I've got two portions of the dough sitting in my freezer waiting to be baked. While baking will be the ultimate test, I'm very pleased that it wasn't too finicky to make and it has many visible layers.

Update: I used this dough to bake meat pie for my partner's birthday. It was so flaky, buttery, and puffed up beautifully! This will definitely be my go-to rough puff recipe.

Filling:

• Beef and Guinness stew - Recipe tin eats

Bake:

• Blind bake bottom @425 for 15 mins

• Remove weights & foil, bake for another 15 mins

• Fill, top, egg wash and bake @350 for 20 mins. Can bump to 425 towards end if needed.

What I learned

Puff pastry vs rough puff. I had to look this up. While this recipe is called puff pastry, it's actually rough puff. Puff pastry (think: croissant) uses a solid butter block to laminate the dough. Rough puff grates the butter into the dry flour, like a shortcrust, but incorporates folds like a puff pastry to get those beautifully imperfect layers.

It will hydrate with every turn. Without fail, pie dough makes me second guess myself. It always starts off so crumbly that I doubt it'll ever come together. But the nice thing about doing multiple turns, is it gives more opportunity for the flour to hydrate. By the 4th turn, it was a soft and cohesive pie dough. Trust the process!

Grated butter coated in flour

After being wrapped in the fridge

Fold #1

Fold #2

Fold #3

Cross section of the layers after fold #4

Have a bench scraper handy. The dough got a point where it just didn't want to roll anymore — but it was still too thick. I gently used a bench scraper to release the dough from the counter, and that allowed me to continue rolling it out to a 1/2" thickness.

The fridge is your friend. I popped the dough in the fridge for 15 minutes after its first turn. That ensured I could do the last 3 turns without worrying that the butter would start to melt. As long as it felt cool to the touch, I continued working it.