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Dessert

Puff Paste

A dough made from butter and flour, rolled with butter layers 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

Prepare the butter

  1. Wash the butter in cold water and squeeze it hard to form a lump.

  2. Divide the butter into eight parts.

Laminate the dough

  1. Mix one part of the butter with the flour, adding just enough water to moisten it.

  2. Roll out the mixture.

  3. Spread a second portion of butter over the rolled dough.

  4. Flour the surface.

  5. Fold the dough up.

  6. Roll it out again, adding another portion of butter.

  7. Repeat the folding and rolling process until all the butter is incorporated.

Rest and finish

  1. Set the paste aside to cool for several hours, preferably overnight in a cold place.

  2. Before using, roll it out once more.

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 thin layers within the dough that separate during folding, giving puff pastry its flakiness.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together around the layers of butter.
Water
Moistens the flour so it binds into a dough that can be rolled and folded.

The step that matters

Repeat the folding and rolling until all the butter is incorporated. Each fold multiplies the butter and dough layers. If the butter softens and smears into the dough, the layers merge and the pastry will not puff 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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