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Dessert

Puff Paste

A light, buttery dough made with butter, flour, lemon juice, cream, and egg, rolled and chilled.

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. Roll the butter into the flour.

  2. Mix in the lemon juice and thin cream.

  3. Add the yolk and white of the egg.

  4. If necessary, add a little water.

Laminate and rest

  1. Roll out thinly and place butter on it.

  2. Roll out again and spread the rest of the butter.

  3. Keep cool until needed.

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 flaky layers that separate the dough during rolling and baking.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and supports the layers.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the dough.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that tenderizes the gluten and brightens flavor.

The step that matters

Keep the butter cool while rolling. If the butter softens and melts into the dough, it blends in instead of forming separate layers, so the pastry loses its flakiness. Keeping the dough cool keeps the butter in distinct sheets that create steam and lift during baking.

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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