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Impossible to miss this recipe so much it is present in pastry and in salted preparations. Much simpler than it looks, it is really better than the ones you find in the supermarket! For your information, my kitchen in Paris is very small and I preferred to wait to prepare the puff pastry in my parents’ house (from where I prepare a lot of recipes) but I finally succeeded without any problem in spite of the lack of space to make the turns. So there’s no excuse not to try!
For distemper:
-500g of flour
-150g of butter
-12g of salt
-250ml of water
For the finalization:
-400g of butter
Start by preparing the tempera. Put the flour and butter in a bowl. I put it all in the bowl of the kitchenaid food processor but you can do without it!
Sand the whole thing. That is, in a kitchenaid or kenwood bowl, use the “k” and mix until the butter coats the flour particles. The whole thing looks like sand. If you don’t have a machine, you have to sand the mixture between the palms of your hands, a bit like for a fine crumble.
Dissolve the seil in water.
Add the salt water in one go and mix with the “k” or by hand just to homogenize everything without working the dough any longer.
The dough is ready! Phew, first step completed! The dough is quite soft at this stage and slightly sticky.
Put the distemper on a stretch film and try to make it a rectangular shape of 2 or 3 centimeters thick.
Let the tempera rest in the refrigerator for about 2 hours. Lightly flour the work surface (mine is very small!). Do not add too much flour as this will change the proportions of the dough!
Roll out the dough so that it is 3 times as long as it is wide.
The butter should be the same consistency as the tempera!
Place the butter in the center in a square shape, leaving one third of the tempera bare at the top and one third at the bottom.
Fold the bottom third over the butter and then the top third over the dough, covering the butter. Turn the dough by 90°. We thus find ourselves as on the photo below.
Roll out the dough in starting always pressing lightly in the middle of the dough, in order to make it even. Flour as needed lightly by stroking the dough to apply a microscopic layer of flour…
Roll out the dough so that it is again 3 times as long as it is wide.
Fold in three as before and turn 90°. This is a simple trick. (You could roll out the dough so that it is 4 times as long as it is wide and fold the dough into quarters, but I didn’t have the space. These rounds are in this case double rounds and correspond to a single round and a half).
Repeat this operation twice to get a total of 3 single turns (or if they are double turns, repeat only once to get a total of 2 double turns).
At this point, fold in thirds and wrap in cling film and chill for an hour or two.
Remove the dough from the refrigerator and apply 3 new single turns to the dough or two double turns.
Fold over one last time in thirds and let the dough rest in the refrigerator until needed, wrapped in cling film.
THAT’S IT!!!
All that’s left to do is cut the dough into 4 squares and roll out the squares thinly to use as we wish…
To ensure that the dough rises perfectly in the oven, cut strips of dough (in the desired shape) with a good knife and very neatly. This way, the dough will not have any resistance on the sides to rise.
I used to make tarts tatin with shortcrust pastry, but after practicing at home, I am now very excited… I have to say that a homemade puff pastry is really delicious.
For a tatin, however, the dough must be cut 1 or 2 centimeters larger than the diameter of the pan and then pricked as much as possible to prevent it from swelling during baking!
And here is the result of my mini tatin with puff pastry. I will soon put the recipes of the tarts tatin with the shortcrust pastry AND the puff pastry!
