Skip to main content
Dessert

To Make Puff Paste

A dough made by layering butter and flour, chilled and rolled for puff pastry.

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

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 and place it in cold water.

  2. Sift the flour.

  3. Rub half of the butter lightly into the flour.

Make the dough

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

  2. Roll out the dough.

Fold in the butter

  1. Add half of the remaining butter in pieces.

  2. Fold the dough.

  3. Roll it out again.

  4. Add the rest of the butter.

  5. Lightly sprinkle flour on the dough.

  6. Fold the dough together.

  7. Refrigerate.

  8. Roll it out twice more.

Finish

  1. Add the beaten egg white to the mixing water.

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).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 separate layers that make the pastry flaky.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure.

The step that matters

Keeping the butter cold and in distinct pieces. If the butter softens and blends into the dough, it cannot form the separate layers that make puff pastry rise and flake.

“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.

More puff pastry recipes

Dough 47Jam Sandwiches 11Cheese 10Rings 10Jam Squares 9Meat Rolls 8 See all 341 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes