Homemade Puff Pastry is easier than you think and so worth your time

We’ll making homemade puff pastry today which is a simple dough folded many times to enclose layers of butter that when baked puff up into impossibly flaky, shatteringly crispy, light, airy confections.

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I think I came across puff pastry with an episode of Martha Stewart when I was a kid. She swore up and down that if you had puff pastry in your freezer, you could make an appetizer in 15 minutes. It took me many many years to get up the courage to figure this classic pastry out. I read books, watched videos, and everything seemed so overly complicated–so much so that my courage failed me and I would shelve it for another day.

Finally, becoming a baking teacher forced me to learn for the sake of my students. I gotta say when I finally screwed up my courage to try, making this was far less difficult than I had been led to believe. Shoot, it’s harder to write about how to make it than it is to actually make it. And yes, Martha was right–once you have this incredible pastry in your freezer, you CAN make palmiers, schaumrolle, cheese straws, turnovers, and any other number of jaw-droppingly good pastries in the blink of an eye.

And no, you will not see a recipe for rough puff pastry here because you’ll see it’s just not as hard as you’ve been led to believe. I say that as someone who was terrified about this dough for YEARS. Don’t be like me. Let me show you how easy it is to make classic puff pastry. And if this still looks like too much, try my easy cream cheese pastry–it’s almost as good and very quick to make.

You got this, I promise.

Puff Pastry Recipe

What even is puff pastry?

Puff pastry is a laminated dough, called pâte feuilletée in French, Blätterteig in German, and pasta sfoglia in Italian and many other names in other languages.

Laminated doughs are made when you take a plain dough made of flour and water (or milk) and use it to enclose a block of butter or other fat like lard. By folding the dough over itself and rolling and folding and turning the dough, the butter block gets thinned out and redistributed into a growing number of layers of butter between dough.

When you bake this pastry, the butter melts, creating steam between the layers of dough, and the dough “puffs” up to create the extremely thin, crispy layers that we love so much.

Why people buy frozen puff pastry

Most people buy frozen puff pastry out of convenience. There are so many things you can make in so little time with puff pastry, that it makes sense why people would want a shortcut.

And yet…frozen puff pastry is rarely made with all or any butter, and often with ingredients you may not want to be eating. I see you high fructose corn syrup!

Why homemade puff pastry is worth your time

1. Cheaper: People, frozen puff pastry is really really pricey for the amount you get in a box. You can literally use the fanciest butter out there and still be money ahead.
2. Better ingredients for better taste: Homemade puff pastry is just so much tastier. You cannot beat the flavor of all butter and you can use better flour, giving you a much higher quality than something you can buy.
3. It takes less time than you think: Puff pastry takes a long time to get a batch from start to finish, but very little of that time is active time. For a batch, it takes no more than 15 minutes of active time spread out over several hours. If you can make bread, you can puff pastry.
4. Relaxing and Rewarding: Who would think that beating a block of butter in between a sheet of dough could be relaxing? Yet it is! After your first turn, you’ll start to see the layers build up and your dough get easier and easier to handle.

Bonus note: If your dog is like mine, puff pastry will surely cement your best friend relationship. My Mom is always sneaking my Sundae bits of baked puff pastry. As a result, when I’m making a batch, Sundae follows me around the kitchen with the intensity that’s somewhere between a poor miserable starving waif and a hypnotist. She’s dead serious about her goal!

The one piece of equipment you need for puff pastry

A Solid rolling pin: Pick a rolling pin that’s heavy for its size. It can have rolling handles or not. Don’t let anyone bully you into using a French rolling pin; the best rolling pin is what’s comfortable for you to use and provides adequate leverage during rolling.

Puff pastry vocabulary

• Butter block: literally a block of butter. You’ll form the butter block by smoothing room temperature butter into a form and then chilling it. The butter block gets encased in the dough to start forming the layers.
• Turn: A turn refers to one time of rolling out the puff pastry and folding it in thirds before turning it 90 degrees and rolling it out again across the folds you just made. Good puff pastry has 6-8 turns. Beyond that the layers become so thin that they have less room to puff, so it becomes less worth your time to keep adding layers.

Tips for the best puff pastry

1. Use the gram scale: This is one time I will not give standard American measurements in the recipe as the proportion of butter and liquid to the flour is important. Pull out the gram scale if I haven’t already convinced you that it’s the smartest tool to use as a baker yet!
2. Keep things square: I’ve stopped measuring my sheets of puff pastry, but it is helpful to make sure that you’re working square. Ragged edges will give you uneven lamination and be annoying to work with. There’s a lot of people who will cut off edges with a pizza wheel to make sure they’re working square. It’s not a bad idea.
3. Use better butter: Another plug for European style butters. For some reason, these higher fat butters are also more flexible, making it easier to roll into layers of butter that don’t break when you roll them.
4. Cold yes, hard, no: It’s important for the butter to be cold, but if it’s too cold, you’ll have to bash it to flatten it between the layers of dough. This is no fun and it could lead to you squashing the butter so that it breaks inside, leaving you with uneven lamination. Simply set your butter out for about 15 minutes before you enclose the butter block in dough. In that time the butter will warm up enough to be workable.
5. Wrap, wrap, wrap: Always rewrap your dough in plastic between turns. It will keep the dough from drying out.
6. Chill, chill, chill: Chilling the dough between turns will firm the butter back up and allow the gluten to relax. If you try to speed run this process, you’ll end up with tough dough that won’t puff correctly.

How to make puff pastry and not let it become THAT kitchen project that takes over your whole life

Making puff pastry is quite literally something that you do piece by piece in between other things. Here’s how I manage it:

1. Morning, day 1: Take out the butter and let it come to room temp.
2. Evening, day 1: Make the butter block, wrap it. Make the dough and wrap it. Place it on a sheet tray and place it in the fridge. My fridge has a pull-out drawer that makes this easy for chilling. If you don’t have this, just set your tray somewhere in your fridge for easy access.
3. Day 2: Enclose the butter, do the first turn, chill.
4. 30 minutes-1 hour later: next two turns.
5. 30 minutes-1 hour later: next two turns.
6. Ready to use or wrap for the freezer: Usually I’ll use some of the pastry straight away and then wrap up the rest of it, first in plastic, then in a plastic bag for the freezer. When I need to use puff pastry, I’ll let it thaw in the fridge overnight.

Truly, after the first time you make this, you’ll sense the process, and the turns will become second nature to you, taking no more than a couple minutes at a go.

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