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Dessert

Puff Paste for Pies

A dough made from pastry flour, butter, salt, sugar, and ice water, folded and rolled to create a layered puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 for Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash your hands with soap, then dip them in hot and cold water.

  2. Rinse a large bowl with boiling water, then with cold, and fill it half with cold water.

  3. Wash the butter in the cold water until it is light and waxy.

  4. Shape the butter into two thin cakes and chill in ice water.

Make the dough

  1. Mix salt and sugar with the flour.

  2. Rub one-third of the butter into the flour with your hands.

  3. Add the ice water and stir quickly with a knife until a smooth ball forms.

  4. Lightly flour a board and turn the pastry onto it.

  5. Pound the pastry lightly with a rolling pin without breaking it.

Laminate and chill

  1. Roll the pastry to about ¼ inch thick, then spread remaining butter in bits on top.

  2. Sprinkle lightly with flour and fold the pastry from each side to meet in the middle.

  3. Fold from the ends without having them meet, then double the pastry.

  4. Pound lightly and roll to about ⅓ inch thick, repeating the folding and rolling process three times for pies.

  5. Chill the rolled pastry in the ice for at least one hour before use.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Pastry flour
Forms the structure that the butter layers are folded into.
Butter
Creates separate layers that steam apart during baking, giving puff and flakiness.
Ice water
Keeps the butter cold and hydrates the flour to form a workable dough.
Salt
Seasons the dough and strengthens its gluten structure.

The step that matters

Keeping the butter cold while folding. If the butter softens and melts into the dough, the layers blend instead of separating, so the pastry bakes flat rather than puffing. Chilling between folds keeps the butter in distinct layers.

“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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