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Dessert

Puff Paste

A dough made from butter, flour, lemon juice, and egg, rolled and folded to create a flaky pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Puff Paste

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine the butter and flour with the lemon juice.

  2. Mix in thin cream instead of water, and add the yolk and white of the egg.

  3. If necessary, add a little water to achieve the right consistency.

Laminate and rest

  1. Roll out the dough thinly and place small dabs of butter on top.

  2. Roll out again and spread the remaining butter evenly.

  3. Fold the dough, let it rest for an hour, then use for tarts or savory pies.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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 layers that separate into flakiness when the dough is rolled and folded.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together through rolling and folding.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the dough.

The step that matters

Rolling and folding with butter. The butter must stay in distinct layers rather than melting into the flour. If the dough becomes warm or the butter softens too much, the layers blend and the pastry loses its flakiness.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, cream, egg):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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