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INE Puff Paste
To make fine puff paste take one pound of flour, half a pound of butter and half a pound of lard. Cut the hard butter and lard in thin shelly pieces through the cold sifted flour. Mix the whole with enough icewater to make it roll easily. There must be no kneading, and the warm hands should come as little in contact with the dough as possible.
A classic half-fat-to-flour rough puff, built on the older habit of splitting the fat between butter for flavour and lard for flake. The whole method rests on keeping everything cold and handling it as little as possible.
- Weights to volumeOne pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups; half a pound each of butter and lard is one cup of each (two sticks of butter). Weighing is far more reliable here than scooping, since the fat-to-flour ratio is what makes the layers.
- The hinge: temperature"Hard butter and lard" means straight from the refrigerator, cut into flat flakes rather than rubbed to crumbs. Those sheets of solid fat are what separate the dough into leaves as their water turns to steam; once they soften into the flour you have shortcrust instead.
- Ice waterThe original gives no quantity because flour absorbency varies; add it a few tablespoons at a time and stop as soon as the mass holds together when pressed.
- No kneadingGluten development is the enemy of this paste. Bring the dough together with a fork or bench scraper, gather it, and give it three or four turns of fold-and-roll with rests in the refrigerator between if it starts to resist.
- Cold handsThe warning about warm hands is practical, not fussy. Work on a marble slab or a chilled sheet pan if your kitchen is warm, and chill the finished paste at least 30 minutes before rolling it out for use.
- LardModern shelf-stable lard is often hydrogenated and behaves differently from freshly rendered lard. Look for leaf lard, or use all butter and accept a slightly less tender crumb.
- BakingNo oven is given. Puff paste wants a hot start, 425F, so the fat sets the layers before it melts out; drop to 375F after 15 minutes if the pastry is browning faster than it is drying.
- YieldThis makes roughly 2 lb of paste, enough for two double-crust pies, a large batch of patty shells, or several dozen small turnovers. It freezes well, wrapped tightly, for about three months.
Puff paste of this kind stands apart from yeast doughs: its lift comes entirely from steam trapped between layers of fat, a technique European cookery books had been describing since at least the seventeenth century and which American household manuals inherited whole. The half-butter, half-lard split is characteristic of domestic baking in periods when lard was cheap and valued for the tenderness it gave, while butter was added for taste. Ice water is worth noticing too: the instruction suggests a cook who could reasonably be told to have cold water and hard fat on hand.