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.Puff Pastry 101




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Puff pastry is a superflaky dough with hundreds of buttery layers. It is made by wrapping a simple pastry dough around a stick of cold butter, rolling the dough, folding the dough over itself at least four times, and chilling the dough for at least one hour between each fold. When baked, the water in the butter creates steam, which causes the dough to puff into flaky, delicate layers.

Almost no one—not even chefs at fine restaurants—makes puff pastry anymore. Home cooks have one, maybe two commercial options in the freezer case. Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry Sheets (made with vegetable oil, not butter) is available in almost every supermarket. Some better supermarkets and gourmet shops carry Classic Puff Pastry from Dufour Pastry Kitchens. When pitted in the test kitchen against Pepperidge Farm, the all-butter pastry was easy to pick out and was the clear favorite. That said, tasters felt that Pepperidge Farm was pretty good. Because each brand has different size sheets, we decided to use the more widely available Pepperidge Farm puff pastry to develop our tart recipe.

From a single rectangular sheet of pastry dough (Pepperidge Farm has two pieces of dough in a single box), we trimmed 1-inch strips of dough from all four sides and used egg wash to cement them to the top of the sheet, creating a uniform 1-inch border. This single tart shell looked large enough for two to three servings. With scarcely any more effort, we found we could serve twice as many by joining the two pieces of dough that came in the box (we sealed the seam tightly with egg wash and rolled it flat), making a long rectangular version (roughly 16 by 8 inches, with the same 1-inch border made from strips cut from all four sides of the large rectangle). Once assembled, the tart got a heavy brushing with beaten egg.