25 Savory Puff Pastry Recipes You Haven’t Tried Before (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to puff pastry? ›

Always preheat your oven for a minimum of 15-20 minutes before baking, because Puff Pastry depends on even heat to rise and puff. Place pastries 1 inch apart. If you want a flaky thin and crispy pastry that's not very puffy, prick the unbaked Puff Pastry all over with a fork, which lets steam escape while baking.

Heat is the enemy of Puff Pastry—it handles best when cold. So avoid working with it on hot, humid days, in a stifling hot kitchen or next to your oven.

The process of making puff pastry involves repeatedly folding and rolling the dough with layers of butter in between. This creates a laminated structure with many layers, and when baked, the moisture in the butter turns into steam, causing the layers to separate and puff up.

Puff pastry does need some gluten development but, because of the amount of rolling out that will happen during lamination, it is very easy to overwork a dough which makes it incredibly hard to use and can cause a lot of shrinkage.

Adding vinegar tenderizes the pastry. It inhibits gluten from forming there by making the pastry tender and flaky.

We are Team Egg Wash (or Cream Wash). While melted butter adds more flavor than the washes, it is less effective in look; it gives a speckled appearance to pastry.

Filo is the lowest-calorie option too, and it's easy to use. You can buy it fresh or frozen (defrost first if it's frozen). Just scrunch up the sheets and place on top of the pie and it crisps up nicely.

However, you can increase their shelf-life by storing them inside an air-tight container and refrigerating them. Can I Eat Expired Puff Pastry? No, you shouldn't eat expired puff pastry. Puffs are best known for their flakiness and crispness.

​​Puff Pastry​

Croissants, or even fan khari are highly rich in fat, may seem like a tempting way to start your day, but they contain yeast, a type of microbe that irritates the stomach lining and can result in flatulence.

Puff pastry, also known as pâte feuilletée, is a flaky light pastry made from a laminated dough composed of dough (détrempe) and butter or other solid fat (beurrage). The butter is put inside the dough (or vice versa), making a paton that is repeatedly folded and rolled out before baking.

What butter is best for puff pastry? ›

You will have trouble keeping the margarine from melting while you're laminating the dough. While there are sticks of hard margarine, I highly suggest sticking with butter. Use European-style butter or French butter if possible as it results in more layers due to its high-fat content and will taste much better.

The verdict: It's certainly cheaper to make your own pastry and I like the fact that most times, I'll have the ingredients to hand, no need for a special trip to the shops.

While all-purpose flour is fine and can be used successfully for homemade puff pastry, we recommend using strong bread flour like this for best results. Bread flour has a higher protein content than all-purpose flour, and therefore, contains more gluten.

Puff pastry is mainly made by 3 important ingredients, flour, water, and fat (butter or oil). Unfortunately, I learned that butter and oil, consist of 100% fat. I've successfully created puff pastry using oil in a pan before. It works!

Use a floured surface to roll out your Puff Pastry sheet, but be sure to brush off excess flour before filling, cutting or folding, since flour will prevent layers from sticking together. When cutting Puff Pastry, the sharper the knife or pastry cutter, the better.

Milk is too runny and will burn but you can add a little to your egg wash to make it a little thinner for coating. Melted butter also burns quite quickly. Egg wash is the most reliable because it coats the pastry evenly and doesn't run off.

Temperature is a key factor in baking up puff pasty that actually puffs. Set the oven dial too low, and the pastry is likely to fall flat. Follow this tip: As a rule of thumb, a higher oven temperature (400°F is ideal) results in puff pastry with a higher rise.

The secret is steam and hundreds of paper-thin layers of dough. Puff pastry starts out as a lean dough of just water and flour. This dough gets rolled, stretched, and folded with a healthy amount of butter again and again until all of those layers are formed.