“Clever chefs and professional pâtissiers make proper puff pastry,” says Delia, “but it is not something for the fraught cook, trying to juggle this with the rest of life happening outside the kitchen.” Which, seeing as Delia has a recipe for toast that takes the best part of half an hour to prepare, should give you an idea of how tricky real puff pastry is.
Fortunately, Delia has a middle way – “quick and easy flaky pastry” – which tastes just as good as the real thing, and is as light “as a whisper”, or so she says. Her secret? Partially frozen butter, and a grater.
It is when I read the word “grater” that I begin to feel suspicious. I am willing to believe the following sentence: “just use a grater – it will be easy”. I am less sold on the sentence “just use a grater – it will be quick”. Quick grating, in my experience, tends to be painful grating.
Freeze the butter until it is as hard as gouda or cheddar – around 30 to 45 minutes will do – and then grate into sifted plain flour. Then proceed as you would for ordinary shortcrust.
So far, so good. What is forming in my hands looks like pastry, feels like pastry, and smells like pastry. After I bag it up and put it in the fridge for the requisite half an hour, it tastes like pastry. Good, deliciously fluffy pastry.
But as I begin to roll it out, something awful happens. I have indeed made something as light as a whisper – so light, in fact, that it turns to dust beneath the rolling pin.
Not to be deterred, I go back to the drawing board. By “drawing board”, I mean I spend the next two days looking obsessively at the photographs in Delia’s book, trying to work out what, exactly, could have gone wrong.
That done, I embark on Attempt Two, the butter weighed and chopped so it looks exactly like Delia’s pictures. Once again, it looks like pastry, feels like pastry, smells like pastry, but rolls out like dust. At this point, I go a little mad. By day, I read and re-read Delia’s recipe. At night, I dream of pastry that turns to dust underneath my hands. I snap at my partner. I berate my colleagues. I phone my mum who tells me, in a disappointed tone, that she has never struggled with Delia’s recipe.
The good news is that, if you very carefully flatten this pastry directly on to a baking dish, you can make a perfectly good galette. Galettes can have either savoury or sweet toppings, and the pastry serves as an edible plate. They are usually circular and elegant – mine are oblong and ugly.
What can I be getting wrong? The answer comes courtesy of Delia’s online cookery school, a series of handy videos that Delia, in her infinite wisdom, has made available on her website.
After watching several times, I know Delia’s hands better than my own. I also realise what’s going on: I am clumsy and cowardly, so I grate my butter cautiously to avoid losing bits of finger in the process. Delia is graceful and hard as nails, so grates the butter without fear – and while it’s still frozen. When I make it, I end up with melted butter on my fingers – which is delicious, but leaves my pastry less buttery than it should be. After more experimentation, I hit on a solution: add an extra 30g of butter, more than making up for what was lost.
The resulting galettes are circular, elegant – and delicious. Just as well, as I think I’ll have to make quite a few to mend fences at home and at work.
- Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year; @stephenkb. You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @deliaonline
