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Dessert

English Puff-Paste

A dough made by layering butter and flour, rolled and folded to create a flaky pastry.

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

English Puff-Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Break the butter lightly into the flour.

  2. Add the butter and a pinch of salt.

  3. Gradually add cold water to form a smooth, pliable paste.

Laminate

  1. Roll the paste out to ¾ inch thick.

  2. Place 6 ounces of butter in small bits on the paste.

  3. Fold the paste like a blanket pudding and roll it out again.

  4. Add another 6 ounces of butter and repeat the rolling process.

  5. Dust flour over the board and paste each time.

  6. Add 6 more ounces of butter and roll the paste out thin 3 or 4 times, folding the ends into the middle.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the paste that holds the layers of butter.
Butter
Creates separate layers that puff up into flakes as the pastry bakes.

The step that matters

Rolling and folding the butter into the paste. The butter must stay cold and in distinct layers. If it softens and blends into the dough, the layers are lost and the pastry will not flake or puff.

“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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