April 10, 2010 - 2:57pm
Help! Puff Pastry
Hi everyone. I've been making puff pastry two days straight and I've noticed that my puff has a dry mouth feel. I'm wondering why it is. Could it be because I'm using water in my dough?In this post by Uisgea http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2041/puff-pastry Jacques Pepin's recipe suggests using water or heavy cream for the dough. Has anyone tried making puff pastry using milk or cream? Does anyone have tips to make my puff taste more "moist" but still achieve great flaky results and a nice rise? Any comments/suggestions/ideas would be much appreciated. Thanks!
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Hey uberathlete,
I'm going to have to be one to vote for water as the liquid in puff pastry dough. It creates a crispier/flakier puff than with milk. I use milk in my croissant dough to provide a contrast, but it makes the dough a little breadier.
I can send you my recipe if you'd like to try it out. It's kind of a combination of Bernard Clayton's and Bo Friberg's puff pastry recipes, with my own technique to boot.
-Mark
As for the dryness, it could be you're overworking the dough during the laminating, creating a tougher and drier dough.
Hi Mark. Hmm ... yeah it's possible that I'm overworking the dough. nbicomputers has this recipe http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/6122/puff-pastry that adds eggs. Do you think that would make more sense to use rather than milk? This dryness issue has been bugging me since yesterday. Anyways, I'd love to try your recipe if you don't mind. My email is uberathlete@yahoo.com . Thank you as always Mark.
Norm's recipe and mine differ in a few ways, but what it comes down to is just personal preference. Likewise many croissant traditionalists prefer water for the liquid as it creates a crispier dough. I think the milk/egg combination in croissant dough provides a superior flavor, and the water/no egg combination puff pastry dough makes the locked in butter taste that much more outstanding. Recipe's on the way.
-Mark
Hi Uberathlete,
I'm with Mark on his choices of liquid, although I don't use egg in either formula.
What hydration level are you using for the puff paste? What is the spec of your flour? I think you could well be overworking the dough. Lots of rest between turns, and work COLD!
Best wishes
Andy
First of all I'd like to respectfully disagree with the comment in the recipe posted at http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/6122/puff-pastry "AP DOES NOT HAVE ENOUGH GLUTEN to make a good pastry"
When I make puff pastry I want pastry, not bread; and high protein flour is not a good foundation for pastry. AP flour would work better, adding a bit of cake flour would improve the formula even more.
My puff pastry formula is flour, water, butter. That's it. Adding eggs makes it a croisant formula. Working cold, to the point of obsession, is important with puff pastry. The butter must be layerd between sheets of dough with every fold and not incorporated into the body of the hydrated flour.
The essential difference between croissant dough and puff pastry is that croissant dough is yeasted, while puff pastry is not. Traditional croissant dough does not have eggs in it I believe, though many croissant recipes nowadays have eggs in them.
Also, puff pastry has way more butter folded into it then any croissant dough would have. I've never tested it, but I'd say that if you did have the same amount of butter in croissant dough, the weight of it would interfere with the yeast fermentation.
I didn't intend to imply that "eggs" alone qualified it for a croisant dough. I meant only that eggs are an element in croisant dough where they are not (in my experience) included in the formula for puff pastry.
Sorry if that was misleading. My croisant formula (Bernart Clayton - Complete Book of Small Breads) includes flour, yeast, eggs, butter, water, milk, cream, sugar, salt. My puff pastry dough includes water, flour, salt, butter ...
Hope that clears it up.
I make a nice classic puff pastry with water, flour, butter, and a little salt. I wouldn't use milk or cream simply because I don't think its necessary. I don't know if the added fat would produce an ill effect by tenderizing the dough or not, but I don't see a reason to add it in.
The rise and flakiness is absolutely dependent on good lamination (six folds!). The formula I use is only 50% hydration, and I let the dough rest for 30 minutes between each set of two folds, so the dough doesn't get overworked.
That'll probably help if you're overworking your dough.