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To Make Puff Paste

A laminated dough made by folding butter into flour and water to create layers.

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

Prepare

  1. Mold the butter with your hands and place it in cold water.

  2. Sift the flour and rub half of the butter into it.

Make the dough

  1. Mix the flour with cold spring water to form a dough.

Laminate the dough

  1. Roll out the dough and place pieces of the remaining butter on top.

  2. Fold the dough, roll it out again, and add the rest of the butter.

  3. Dust lightly with flour, fold it together, and refrigerate.

Finish

  1. When ready to use, roll it out twice more.

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 separate layers that puff into flakes as moisture turns to steam in the oven.
Flour
Its gluten network forms the dough that holds the thin layers together.

The step that matters

Keep the butter cold while rolling and folding. If the butter softens and blends into the dough, it cannot form distinct layers, so the pastry will not puff and flake properly.

“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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