I once made puff pastry from scratch. That's why I now buy it at the store.
When done right, puff pastry is almost supernatural. You take a thin, flat piece of dough, bake it, and it puffs up into a work of art many times its original size, with hundreds of the thinnest, flakiest, most delicate layers of pastry suspended ethereally in its buttery goodness.
All that, and it's delicious, too.
Making it at home takes time, dedication and not an inconsiderable amount of effort. And until you develop the right touch for it, you can end up (like I did) with a flat, leaden plank of pastry. Mine was buttery, but it wasn't puffy at all.
So I take the store-bought shortcut, and I am not ashamed. You can find puff pastry in the freezer section of your local grocery store.
Once you get it, the question isn't what you can do with it, the question is what can't you do with it. It's good for sweet dishes and for savory, you can use it for appetizers and desserts, and Beef Wellington just wouldn't be Beef Wellington without it.
I used it for four dishes and could not have been happier about the way they turned out. Whether the recipes were ridiculously simple (ahem, doughnuts) or somewhat more complicated (chicken pot pie), the store-bought puff pastry made making them easy.
And they all tasted great.
I started with chicken pot pie, because I have fond memories of eating it at the Walnut Room in a Chicago Marshall Field's store before the store acquired the much less romantic name of Macy's. It was, in my memory, the best chicken pot pie I had ever had. I liked it so much I bought the Marshall Field's cookbook just so I could have the recipe.
That was years ago, but I never made the recipe until now. That's because I was a little daunted by the calories, and more than a little disappointed that the published recipe appeared to leave out a number of ingredients.
But I made it, and I added the missing ingredients (though it's fewer than I thought) and now the pot pie is back to being one of the best I have ever had. The secret is that it uses a veloute sauce, which is easier to make than it sounds. You simply stir together melted butter and flour, and slowly add hot chicken stock until you get a sauce that is rich and velvety ("veloute" is French for "velvety").
The delicate puff pastry on top is just icing on the cake _ a very rich cake, with an incredible veloute sauce.
Next up were the pretzels, but these are not ordinary pretzels. These are called Puffzels, I'm sorry to say, because they are made with puff pastry. The resulting pretzels are lighter in texture than you might expect, but they are also heavier because of a surprise lurking inside the dough.
The pretzels _ sorry, Puffzels _ are stuffed with cheese, sausage and a smear of mustard. They are hearty, which is not a word typically associated with puff pastry, and utterly delicious.
If that is the savory side of puff pastry, it shines just as brightly with the sweet. Puff pastry is a natural for desserts, so I made two.
The first was doughnuts, and they were easier to make _ and took less time _ than driving to a doughnut shop and back. I just cut big circles out of the puff pastry dough, cut smaller circles out of the middle of those, dropped them (both the bigger and smaller circles) in hot oil and fried them for maybe two minutes at the most.
They still needed sugar, so I put powdered sugar on some and a cinnamon-sugar mix on others. Then I put cinnamon sugar on top of the ones with powdered sugar, which was best of all. I could have dipped some in a simple glaze, too, but why bother with that when you can coat them in a mixture of powdered sugar and cinnamon-sugar?
And for the dessertiest dessert, I made Wrapped Pears With Vanilla Bean Sauce. These take some effort _ and a lot more time than the doughnuts _ but they are absolutely worth it. It is the type of dessert to serve at a dinner party.
First, you briefly poach pears in a vanilla syrup (water, sugar and vanilla bean). Then you refrigerate the pears until they are cold again, all the while adding a bit of cream to the vanilla syrup and reducing it until it is slightly thick and tastes like heaven.
Then you wrap the pears in strips of puff pastry like a mummy and bake until they are golden brown. Serve them with the vanilla cream syrup and a scattering of raspberries, and you have one of those great flavor combinations that are too often forgotten.
It's a puff pastry dessert that will make you puff up with pride.
