Why it works: Flour and butter 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
Sprinkle salt in the flour and mix in the shortening with your hands until smooth.
Quickly mix in the cold water.
Roll out the dough and fit it into a pie plate.
Cut off the excess dough evenly around the edge.
Gather scraps to make a thinner top crust.
Fill and bake
Cut four or five small slits in the center of the top crust.
Fill the pie with prepared filling.
Wet the edge of the rim to prevent juices from leaking.
Lay the top crust over the filling and press the edges down with your thumb.
Bake until light brown.
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.
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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour and butter 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
- Flour
- Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with liquid and fat.
- Butter
- Fat that creates flaky layers and tenderness as it stays in pieces within the dough.
- Cold water
- Hydrates the flour to bind the dough while keeping the fat cold and separate.
The step that matters
Quickly mix in the cold water. Overworking the dough after adding water develops gluten, making the crust tough, and warm water or handling melts the fat so flaky layers are lost.
“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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