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How to Make Pastry Rough Puff Paste

A dough for puff pastry made with flour, butter, lemon juice, and salt.

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 ↓

How to Make Pastry Rough Puff Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Put the flour in a bowl and lightly rub in half of the butter with your fingertips.

  2. Add a pinch of salt and the lemon juice, mixing with a spoon.

  3. Turn the mixture onto a floured board and roll it out to about ¼ inch thick.

Laminate

  1. Drop small pieces of the remaining butter onto the dough.

  2. Dust the dough with flour.

  3. Fold the dough over three times.

  4. Roll the dough out again.

  5. Repeat the process of dropping butter, dusting flour, folding, and rolling out three times.

  6. Roll the dough out to the desired thickness.

  7. If making tartlets, cut into rounds with a pastry cutter.

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).

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once it is mixed with liquid and rolled.
Butter
Forms separate layers that puff up as the pastry bakes, giving a flaky texture.
Lemon juice
Adds a small amount of acidity that helps tenderize the dough.

The step that matters

Keeping the butter in distinct pieces while folding. Butter that melts into the dough is absorbed by the flour rather than forming separate layers, so the pastry will not puff as well. Keeping the dough and butter cool and rolling gently helps the layers stay distinct.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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