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Dessert

To Make Puff Paste

A light, layered pastry dough made by folding butter into flour and water.

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 ↓

To Make Puff Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Rub ¼ pound of butter into the flour.

  2. Make a hole in the middle of the flour and pour in enough cold water to form a light paste.

Laminate

  1. Roll the paste into a sheet and lay the remaining butter in pieces the size of a dollar on top.

  2. Fold the paste over and seal the butter at the ends.

  3. Roll it out as thin as pasteboard.

  4. Fold it carefully like a tablecloth.

  5. Roll it out a second time as thin as the first and fold it up the same way.

  6. Flatten it slightly with a rolling pin, and it is ready for use.

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 between the dough sheets that separate and create flakiness when baked.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough sheets together through rolling and folding.

The step that matters

Sealing the butter in the paste. If butter breaks through or the edges are not sealed, it leaks out during rolling instead of staying in separate layers, which weakens the flaky rise.

“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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