Skip to main content
Dessert

Puff Paste

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the butter

  1. Wash the butter in cold water until light and waxy, then divide it into two parts and chill on ice.

  2. Rub one part of the butter into the flour.

Make the dough

  1. Mix the butter and flour with 1½ cups of ice water using a knife.

  2. Roll the dough into a square shape.

  3. Add the remaining butter in small lumps and sprinkle with a little flour.

  4. Fold the four edges of the dough to meet in the middle.

  5. Fold one half of the dough over the other to trap air.

  6. Pound lightly with a rolling pin.

  7. Roll out and fold as before.

  8. Repeat the rolling and folding process three times.

  9. Roll up the dough and chill in the ice for at least one hour.

Roll and bake

  1. When ready to use, cut a piece from the end to cover the pie.

  2. Sprinkle a little flour on the board and flour the rolling pin.

  3. Roll the dough lightly from you and towards your left hand until it reaches the right size.

  4. Bake immediately.

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

Flour
Forms the gluten structure that holds the layers of dough together.
Butter
Forms separate solid layers that melt and steam during baking, creating flakiness.
Ice water
Hydrates the flour and keeps the butter cold so the dough stays workable.

The step that matters

Keep the butter and dough cold during folding. If the butter softens and blends into the dough, the layers are lost and the pastry turns dense instead of flaky. Chilling between rounds of rolling and folding keeps the butter in distinct pieces that create steam and lift when baked.

“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