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Puff Paste

A pastry dough made by folding butter into flour and egg white, then rolling, folding, and baking into cut shapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 dough

  1. Knead the butter between two folds of a napkin with a spoon until elastic.

  2. Mix 1/8 of the butter with all the flour using a fork.

  3. Add the beaten egg white and enough ice water to form a stiff dough.

  4. Knead the dough until it is full of air bubbles.

Laminate

  1. Roll out the dough lengthwise, using plenty of flour underneath. Brush off excess flour from the top.

  2. Place the remaining butter on the dough. Fold the dough. Refrigerate.

  3. Roll and fold the dough six times. Refrigerate between each roll.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out to ½ inch thick. Cut with a cookie cutter. Press a smaller cutter through the middle. Remove the center.

  2. Bake the cutouts.

  3. Fill with sweetmeats or meat.

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).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 flaky layers as it stays solid between sheets of dough, creating steam pockets when baked.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and supports the layers.
Egg white
Adds binding and structure to the stiff dough.

The step that matters

Refrigerate between each roll. Chilling keeps the butter solid between folds. If the butter softens and blends into the dough, the separate layers are lost and the pastry will not puff properly.

“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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