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Dessert

Puff-paste

A light dough made from flour, butter, and cold water, folded and rolled 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, rub the butter into the flour until very fine.

  2. Add cold water gradually to form a light dough, just stiff enough to work.

Laminate

  1. Roll out the dough to about ¼ inch thick.

  2. Spread a layer of butter over the dough and sprinkle with a little flour.

  3. Fold the dough, then roll it out again.

  4. Repeat the folding and rolling process two more times.

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
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure.
Unsalted butter
Forms separate fat layers that steam apart during baking to create flaky texture.
Cold water
Hydrates the flour so the dough holds together without warming the butter.

The step that matters

Keep the butter cold and in distinct layers. If the butter softens or melts into the dough, the layers blend together instead of separating. Without separate layers of fat, steam cannot lift them apart, so the pastry bakes dense rather than flaky.

“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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