Category: Thanksgiving/Christmas

How to make Blitz Puff Pastry

 Blitz Puff Pastry

Part of the PhD Program of Pastry

 

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Blitz Puff Pastry

Making your own puff pastry from scratch is worth the effort. The real stuff takes more time than the faster, and slightly easier, blitz puff pastry.

Blitz, shortened from Blitzkrieg, means fast. This is blitz puff pastry because it is made more quickly than classic puff pastry. The quality is nearly as good as the classic version and will work for cheese straws, savory palmiers, wrapping brie in pastry, or even vol au vent cups. I would not use this for Napoleon.

How to make blitz puff pastry

The skills used to make both are the same so when you are ready, you can trade up to the classic version. All ingredients should be cold and it can be easily scaled, but not too small. Too little dough is more challenging to roll and that leads to poor results.

The why of the process

Why it works is the dough portion is layered between the butter portion.  This format is similar for croissants and Danish, dough between layers of fat.

Whole butter is not 100% fat: it has some water.  As the pastry heats, the water turns to steam and that expansion of gas raises the pastry.  With both croissant and Danish, that happens but also, the dough has yeast to increase the rise independent of the steam.

In all three cases, a few things need to be so.  The dough must not be rolled to thin or it will tear and the butter layers will meet.  This will result in an area which doesn’t rise the same as the rest.  There’s no way to know in advance where that is.  That area of torn dough shows up when the puff is baked.  That tear is less noticeable in croissant and Danish because the yeast will raise the dough.

The now what?

The baker has a few tools available to help make sure this tear doesn’t happen.

Skill.  Practice practice practice.  And pay attention.

Temperature. The dough and the butter need to be about the same temperature.  Cool enough for the butter to hold its shape and warm enough that it can spread without cracking.  It is a small window.

Time.  Chill the dough as long as necessary to chill the butter to that right temperature, but not too long it gets hard.  Then, rest the pastry between rolls and folds.  This is necessary to relax the gluten which will allow the pastry to be rolled thin enough to make the next fold.

Worth the work

Learning to make laminated dough is effortful.  Rewarding, but effortful.  Be the student and take detailed notes which you can actually read the next day.  What month is it?  What outdoor temperature is it?  What indoor temperature is it?

Years ago, I made puff pastry once a week for a year in Tallahassee, FL.  January is not the same as July and the dough knew, even in an air conditioned kitchen.

As with things challenging, it is, well, a challenge.  Don’t let that stop you.

I would recommend a proper pastry rolling pin.  This pin offers the proper leverage to roll the dough evenly which is important to the success of a laminated dough.

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Blitz Puff Pastry

Blitz puff is, as the name suggests, fast.  Fast, is of course, relative to the classic version. 

This is a very suitable replacement in nearly all cases and for appetizers and toppings for pot pie or Apple Tart Tatin, most excellent.

Course Pastry
Cuisine French
Keyword Blitz puff pastry, French pastry, Puff Pastry
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 20 minutes
Roll and rest 6 hours
Total Time 30 minutes
Author Dann Reid

Ingredients

Make the puff dough

  • 454 g All purpose flour
  • 454 g Whole butter, diced into 1" cubes
  • 1 T Salt
  • 2 T Fresh squeezed lemon juice no seeds, please
  • 14 oz Ice cold water You may not need it all

Instructions

  1. Work on a clean and uncluttered counter. Doughs have a habit of taking more space than you think they might. Add the salt to the flour and the lemon juice to the water.

  2. Place the flour on the counter, make a well in the center and add the diced butter. Work the butter into the flour by mashing the butter with a pastry blade, or between your thumb and forefinger. You can, simultaneously, work the butter and flour with the rest of your fingers. The goal is to make lima bean sized lumps of butter. Chunks of butter is necessary for the proper puffing of the dough.

  3. Arrange the flour butter mix, which should resemble corn meal with butter chunks, into a pile and make a well in the center of that. Add about a third of the water, mix the outside edges of the pile of flour into the middle, mixing the flour mix into the water with your free hand. Push aside the middle to form another well, add the next third, repeat the process and add the last third of water.

  4. The pastry will gather at the ends of your fingers like gluey flour. This can be unnerving, but it is unavoidable. Work the dough by kneading to form a cohesive ball which can be used to clean up all the stray bits of dough.

  5. Use a bench scraper and clean the counter. Lightly flour the work space, place the dough into the middle of the counter, and roll into a rectangle, roughly three times as long as wide. Take care not to let the rolling pin to roll off the edge of the dough. Use your hands to keep the rectangle as uniform as possible and fold the pastry as a letter, the first third starts with the end nearest you and then fold the top portion over that. This is the first fold. Push your finger gently into the top to form a single divot. Some bakers prefer three folds, some prefer four. I use four folds. Place the dough on a sheet pan, cover with plastic wrap and cool for 20 minutes. Repeat this process two (or three) more times, each time pressing your fingers into the dough to reflect the number of folds it has received.

  6. When you pastry is fully rolled and folded, cut them into portions of thirds. Each will be just shy of 1 pound. Wrap each piece well, place into a freezer quality zip top bag. Squeeze as much air out as possible and freeze. Use the dough within 1 month for best quality.

  7. To roll the dough for use, remove the packet from the freezer and place in the refrigerator the night before to thaw slowly. It is important to keep the dough cold for as long as possible. A French pin is certainly useable for rolling puff, and that’s what I have. I do find these pins very helpful for large batches of dough or for ease. If you use a classic pin , it is important that it be a large pin so the handles keep your folded fingers from tearing the dough. Puff pastry dough which gets torn will pull and shrink in that spot and there is little that can be done to fix that. Here is a video showing some of the basics on pastry rolling.

Recipe Video

Recipe Notes

Here's a link to a short video about rolling puff pastry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4QfJtozfAw

 

See the rest of the recipe file here:  Recipes

Chocolate Mousse

 

 

 

Chocolate Mousse

The French have a way with words. Les bon mot, they might say, the right word. Mousse au chocolat. Nearly everyone who has had a spectacular version of this will forever long for it again. And, the wait can be torture. There seem to be far more ways to make it wrong or bad or forgettable than there are ways to get it right.

The best mousse I ever had was, as most good things food are, an example of simplicity disguising its complexity. Chocolate, butter and eggs. Simple, right? Ah, but the secret is always in the production and procedure. I am going to walk you through it and you will have the best chocolate mousse you have ever had.

We have all read recipes which advise us to get the best possible ingredients we can find. In a dish with so few ingredients as this, quality definitely matters. The eggs you buy should be purchased the day before making the mousse.

Chocolate.

You can find some very good selections of chocolate many places these days, including on-line. I enjoy a more bitter chocolate for mousse because that strong flavor will remain, but the bitterness is softened with the butter and eggs and egg whites. The bitter is, in effect, diluted, while the flavor stays. Nice.

ON-It's Chocolate, Baby!

This recipe is an enhancement of the classic three ingredients I mentioned above with the most obvious change the absence of butter. All of the extras may be omitted and you will still have a great dessert (Breakfast?). The coffee and booze are there to enhance the chocolate flavor and the vanilla flavor alone.

Perhaps one of the most important lessons a pastry chef learns is restraint. Supressing the urge to whisk more, add more, fold more, stir more, mix more is an important skill to develop. It is critical here.

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Have all your tools clean and ready to use, including the containers into which the mousse will be served. Allow for room in the cooler for those containers, especially if you are using champagne flutes. Also, have plastic wrap ready to cover the tops of the containers to prevent a skin from forming.

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Chocolate Mousse

There are many almost-as-good versions, but this hits that high bar of being as good as my first memory of the deceptively simple French version.  It is just that good.

Course Dessert
Cuisine French
Keyword Chocolate mousse, Classic French dessert, Dessert for romance, Mousse au chocolat
Prep Time 15 minutes
Refrigeration 4 hours
Total Time 15 minutes
Author Dann Reid

Ingredients

Ingredients for the mousse

  • 8 oz Best quality bittersweet chocolate
  • 2 T Instant espresso powder
  • 8 Each Egg yolks
  • 1/4 C Kahlua or Cognac
  • 6 Each Egg whites
  • 1/4 Each Vanilla pod, seeds scraped

Instructions

Make the mousse

  1. Add the vanilla bean seeds to the alcohol. Save the pod for egg nog.

    Add two inches of water to the pot and place it over medium heat on the stove. Cut the chocolate into rather uniform chunks, place in the bowl and place that onto the pot. Chocolate can burn even from steam, so medium heat is the way to go.

  2. Use the wooden spoon to occasionally stir the chocolate until it is nearly melted. Remove from the heat, turn off the burner, and place the bowl on the counter. Chocolate holds, and makes, its own heat. The rest of the melting will happen on the counter.

  3. Add the yolks to the melted chocolate and whisk the mix to incorporate the chocolate and add the alcohol/vanilla bean mix.

  4. Whip the egg whites in the mixing bowl until firm peaks. That means the whipped whites dip when you remove the whip from the whites.

  5. Folding egg whites is a bit of a skill and an art. Since the chocolate mixture is cooling and getting stiff, we will add a small portion of the whites to the chocolate to soften the base and let us incorporate the remaining whites. See a demonstration here.

  6. The key to a successful fold is to use a wide blade rubber spatula and slice down through the center of the chocolate and lift and drape the chocolate mix on the spatula over the left side portion of the mix. Spin the bowl a few inches and repeat. Once the whites are incorporated, portion the mousse into the cups, top with plastic wrap and cool overnight.

  7. The restraint of a pastry chef comes into play in the folding. I like a few streaks. There is a divided opinion about what is right. At your house, how you serve your food is what is right. The more you fold the less air remains in the whites and the less mousse-y your mousse. So, don’t over fold.

  8. You can top the mousse with whipped cream or eat it plain. It is sure to be a hit.

Recipe Notes

Okay, you've done everything to the letter of the recipe and...something just doesn't look right.

The mousse is lumps instead of smooth and you're ready to commit an atrocity.

Well, I do feel your frustration.  Really.  Nary a baker doesn't know what it is to make and get less than expected.

The difference between which makes a difference is knowing how to handle this challenge.  Put it in an over proof dish, a souffle dish, perhaps, and bake it.  A cake pan will do well also.

It will bake very nicely at 450°F for about 10 minutes, maybe 15, and you'll get a flourless, dairy-free "cake".

See, problem at least averted and product and labor saved. 

It ain't what you set out to make, but it ain't garbage either.