Homemade Puff Pastry

The creator's precise, simple folding pastry, used for pies, tart shells and other dishes needing a crust.

Ingredients

1 cup flour
¼ teaspoon salt
10 tablespoons cold butter, cubed
⅓ cup cold water
Extra flour for rolling surface and rolling pin

Notebook yield: 1 square of pastry per batch.

Notebook time: 15 minutes, with at least 1 hour chilling separately.

Directions

In a medium bowl, combine flour and salt; mix well.
Cube the cold butter and add it to the bowl.
Use a pastry cutter to combine butter and the flour mixture.
Make a well in the center, add the cold water and mix with a fork.
Turn the dough out onto a floured board and form a rough square.
Flour a rolling pin and roll the dough into a rectangle approximately 10 inches long.
Fold into thirds, envelope-style, and roll out again. Repeat the fold-and-roll sequence 7–8 times.
Wrap in plastic and chill at least 1 hour.
Roll out to use as a pastry crust or shell for the intended dish.

How it was used

This is the creator's regular pastry master recipe. She used it for every pie she made and for other recipes requiring a pie crust or pastry shell, including her Three-Ingredient Lemon Tarts. Each batch produces one square; she typically prepared multiple individual batches, wrapped each square in plastic, and stored the extras in the freezer. She disliked conventional pie shells, so one day she experimented with puff pastry for an apple pie and loved the result. After that she used this puff pastry for pumpkin pie, cherry pie and her other pies, replacing conventional pie-shell recipes in her own cooking.

The handwritten recipe specifies 10 tablespoons of butter, replacing an earlier approximate recollection of ½ cup. The notebook gives no universal baking temperature or time because the shaped pastry is used in different dishes.

The handwritten method has one crossed-out line; the surviving numbered method is preserved without inventing the deleted step.

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