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Common Puff Paste, for Pies

A dough made from flour, lard, butter, salt, and cold water, rolled and folded to create layers for pies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Common Puff Paste, for Pies

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Place the flour on a clean surface or in a bowl.

  2. Make a hollow in the center of the flour.

  3. Work the lard and salt into the flour until well mixed.

  4. Add enough cold water to bind the mixture together.

  5. Flour the surface and your rolling pin.

  6. Roll out the paste to ½ inch thickness.

Laminate with butter

  1. Divide the butter into three parts.

  2. Spread one part of the butter evenly over the paste.

  3. Fold the paste.

  4. Dredge the folded paste with flour.

  5. Roll the folded paste out again.

  6. Repeat the process with the remaining butter until all is used.

  7. Roll out the final paste to ¼ inch thickness for pies.

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. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wheat + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

Wheat flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the paste its structure.
Lard
Works into the flour to make the pastry tender and short.
Butter
Forms separate layers that puff into flakes as the pastry bakes.
Cold water
Binds the flour and fat into a cohesive dough.
Salt
Adds flavor and strengthens the dough's gluten structure.

The step that matters

Spreading and folding the butter layers. Butter must stay in distinct layers rather than blending into the dough. If the butter softens or smears, the layers merge and the pastry loses its flaky rise. Keeping the paste cool and rolling evenly preserves the separate sheets of fat.

“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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