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Dessert

Puff Paste

A dough made by mixing butter and flour, then layering butter and folding to create a flaky pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Puff Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub ½ pound of butter into 1 pound of flour using your hands.

  2. Add enough water to form a paste with the consistency of the butter.

  3. Roll out the paste thin.

Laminate and fold

  1. Break ½ pound of butter into pieces the size of a shilling and distribute them over the paste.

  2. Fold the paste, let it rest for a short time, then roll it out again.

  3. Fold it up three times; it is now ready for use.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Forms the separate fat layers that create flakiness when the dough is folded and baked.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and traps the layers between folds.
Water
Combines with the flour to form a workable paste that can be rolled and folded.

The step that matters

Distributing the butter pieces over the paste. Butter must stay in distinct pieces between dough layers. If it softens and blends in, the folds lose their separation and the pastry will not puff as well.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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