Puff Pastry

Lovely, flaky, buttery puff pastry.

I thought I'd create my own post about my experiments with creating puff pastry using UltraFine Fiberflour. Many thanks to Puff Gal for her posts on the same issue; which I followed without success I'm afraid :(

I messed about some more to try and get it right and have arrived at a brilliant version that works for me! The steps are taken from two methods Paul Hollywood published online - links at the bottom of this post.

The main idea is to make this quickly with minimal chilling. This is achieved by using frozen grated butter.

Ingredients

• 260g Ultra fine fiber flour

• 120ml water (enough to hold the flour and butter together as a ball

• 250g frozen grated butter (I used my food processor grating attachment, grated really cold butter and then froze it)

• 3/4tsp salt

• 1 egg (for glazing)

Method

1. In mixer, knead flour, salt, and water until for 5-10 mins. Add the water gradually until the dough forms a ball

2. Turn out and work a little

3. Chill for at least 20 mins

4. Roll out the dough with the short end facing you

5. Get half of grated butter and sprinkle over the bottom 2/3 of dough

6. Lift the exposed dough at the top and fold it down over half of the butter, then fold the butter-covered bottom half of the dough up over the top. Pinch the edges together to seal.

7. Rotate the dough 90 degrees

8. With the short end towards you, roll out to a rectangle as before, keeping the edges as even as possible.

9. Add the remaining 1/2 of the grated butter to the bottom 1/3 of the dough.

10. Repeat steps 6-8

11. Fold the top quarter down and the bottom quarter up so they meet neatly in the centre. Then fold the dough in half along the centre line. This is called a book turn.

12. Turn the dough 90 degrees and roll out again. This time fold down 1/3 of the dough and fold up the bottom third to make a neat square.

13. Turn 90 degrees and repeat.

14. The dough is now ready. Keep it in the fridge until ready to use.

NB: to make the sausage rolls pictured here, I cooked them for about 20 mins at 220 degrees.