Quickest puff pastry

Happy New Year!

Did you have a good holiday? We had a great Christmas - different this year, but great. I didn't quite know what to expect, because December for us is usually a flurry of the pre-vacation work rush followed by travel, sniffles, and familial chaos, suitcases packed and unpacked, presents wrapped and unwrapped. We usually stumble into the new year happily shellshocked, dazed from the holiday long in coming but quick in going, hearts full with the healthy dose of family and friends, eager to settle back into routine ... and tired. Oh, so tired.

This time was different, because for once we neither traveled nor hosted: it was a very cozy Christmas season, just us three and a couple of parties and play dates, enough to make us feel less-hermit/more-festive. There was still work - it seems that vacation time is always lacking, slipping like sand through open fingers - but what a difference can be made by a few extra days off tacked on to weekends!

For once, there were actually enough hours in the day for cookie making and bread baking, movies and skating, reading and napping, Creationary and card games ... it was simply wonderful. A little off topic here, but let me tell you, nothing kills the competitive fire like holding a +4 wildcard that can't be dumped on a 6-year-old who is already losing ... we want to teach him to win graciously and lose courageously, but it's a tad too early to be leaving him in the dust. Parenthood scores again.

So, 2011. I was going to start the year off on a healthy note, what with all the cookies of late, and in that spirit I had planned to bring up farro. Oh, how we love farro. I've been meaning to talk farro for months now, but things keep coming up, and anyway, we keep eating it all before I can take a picture. Note the wistful participles and past perfects and present perfect continuous-es, and I say "wistful" because instead of farro I have for you something on the opposite end of the spectrum, equally delightful but probably not so good for new year's resolutions. But you know, Epiphany is just around the corner, and for some people that means galette des rois, and for me that means the Christmas season isn't over yet ... so I can slide this in before the holiday door slams shut.

Besides, when is it not a good time for puff pasty, right? WAIT! I know you think I'm crazy - normal people don't make homemade puff pastry. And I'll give you that: it does take a special kind of crazy to make puff pastry or puff dough, and while I might immensely enjoy making it the 'traditional' way, I will admit that it takes time and a bit of patience. But this puff pastry is different, and that's why I threw all farro to the wind (figuratively, of course) and decided to share this marvel with you instead.

It's made in the food processor! There, I said it. Can you believe it? In the food processor! Believe it! You blitz it, pat it into a rectangle, roll it out, fold it, and roll it up like you would a sleeping bag. Then you flatten it, let it chillax in the fridge, and it's ready to go. Seriously! Impossibly flaky and shatteringly crisp, it is way better than the puff pastry in your grocer's freezer case, and it is so easy that you could make it on a weeknight - okay, two weeknights if you don't get home until just before dinner - but my point is that this puff pastry, Nick Malgieri's puff pastry, requires marginally more work than any other homemade crust, and that, my friends, is what I would call sheer geeee-niiiii-uuuuus.

It's also what one might call "Bye Bye, New Year's Resolution to ... ahem" ... but that's really only if you were to make and eat this sort of thing regularly, right? Once in a while, for a nice treat or a special occasion, I think it's great that it's actually possible to nonchalantly whip up a batch of homemade puff.

Oh, and if this discovery weren't already exciting enough on its own, I also found out recently that I won another DMBLGIT award for my candied orange peel photo! Thank you to the DMBLGIT judges and to Erica for hosting. What an awesome way to start the year.

Quickest Puff Pastry

It must be my lucky day: the recipe I followed
was posted just today (!) on Nick Malgieri's site.

The amount of butter in any puff pastry frightens me, so the only modification I made to the recipe is that I used 1 stick (½ cup) butter for each cup of flour. It worked perfectly.

Remember to keep your dough nice and cool. When working with puff pastry it is especially important to trim the edges, and to do so when the dough is cold, to ensure maximum "puff capabilities". (If the edges are sealed shut or pinched together, the pastry's expansion will be inhibited).

If you have a TV-oven (and by that I mean an oven with a "window"), it is extremely fascinating to watch the dough as it cooks ... it starts out relatively flat, and a few minutes into baking the layers start to lift and the pastry poooofs to, like, 6 times its original height. Maybe even more. It's crazy cool! Okay. I should stop now.

Nick Magieri has also written about this technique here.