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Dessert

Puff Paste

A dough made from flour, butter, and cold water, folded and chilled to create layers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Puff Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour into a bowl.

  2. Rub in ¼ pound of butter until combined.

  3. Add cold water gradually to form a dough.

  4. Roll out the dough on a floured surface.

Add the butter in layers and chill

  1. Dot the rolled dough with small pieces of the remaining butter.

  2. Fold the dough over.

  3. Roll it out again.

  4. Repeat with the remaining butter.

  5. Lightly sprinkle flour on the dough.

  6. Refrigerate it.

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
Provides the structure, as its proteins form gluten with the water to build the dough.
Unsalted butter
Creates layers of fat that separate the dough sheets, giving a flaky texture.

The step that matters

Refrigerate it.. Chilling keeps the butter solid so it stays in distinct layers. If the butter softens or melts into the dough, the layers blend and the pastry loses its flakiness.

“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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