Puff Pastry

This week we have been making different items with puff pastry, which I've really enjoyed. Puff pastry is considered the most expensive French pastry dough because of the amount of labor that goes into making it by hand and the cost of the ingredients (i.e. lots of butter!). It is really rewarding to make though, because there are so many things you can make with it. It is a very versatile dough. We made 4 different kinds; quick, classic, inverse, and chocolate. Quick puff pastry doesn't rise as high because you just mix in cubes of melted butter with the dough. Classic puff pastry you wrap a basic flour dough around a block of butter and roll it out and fold it like a letter six different times until you have many layers. Inverse and chocolate puff pastry are a bit harder to make and require a pretty cool kitchen because the butter is wrapped around the dough and then rolled out and folded six times.

Here are the products we made on our first day of puff pastry: apple tartlettes and a fresh fruit bar tart.