I had some pears I wanted to use, so I skipped ahead to an intermediate recipe from the holidays section for a tart with pears, dried fruits, and almond cream. The note at the very bottom of the Tarte aux Poires recipe says: "Readymade all-butter puff pastry dough can replace the homemade." Since I had yet to make any of the puff-pastry-type recipes in the tarts section, I decided to make this one from scratch, essentially turning this one recipe into three (candied orange peel being the third component I needed to make from scratch, also from the holiday section).
Puff pastry is often used in napoleons and more traditional galettes (french open-faced tinless pies), though recently galettes have sort of fused with pie dough as a base. Puff pastry, like other laminated doughs (doughs that are folded and rolled out multiple times to create layers of butter between layers of dough, rather than creaming together sugar and butter and flour), is very reliant on keeping the dough and butter cold while working with it to minimize the amount of butter absorbed into the dough. The distinct layers then separate slightly during baking, with the steam from the butter layer helping the dough layers puff up and the fat from the butter layer gently frying the dough, achieving a bunch of flaky, crisp layers as a final result.
To keep the dough cold and flaky, there's three common strategies, usually employed together:
- Use cold workpieces (marble rolling pin, marble worksurface, or iced work surface)
- Use multiple days to prepare the dough, chilling well in between each folding and rolling process
- Use as little flour as possible and a cold dough to prevent sticking
There's a small fourth rule, for the final rolling out prior to baking, to be gentle and not smush or stretch the dough too much, which I failed to do well, but more on that later.
