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Rough Puff Pastry
8 ounces Five Roses flour 6 ounces butter ½ teaspoon lemon juice Pinch of salt Cold water.
Chop the butter in the flour, not too fine, leaving it in pieces the size of a walnut. Make a pit in the centre, put in the lemon juice, sprinkle salt over. Mix rather more than a tablespoon of water slowly and lightly into the flour and butter, adding more water if necessary till it is a stiff paste. Roll out in long strips and fold in three, turning rough edges to right hand. Repeat this until it has been rolled four times.
A compact rough puff — no detrempe, no butter block, just cold butter chopped through flour and folded until the layers appear. The instructions assume a cook who already knows the method, so a few things go unsaid.
- Everything coldThis is the hinge. The butter must stay in distinct pieces through all four turns; if it warms and smears into the flour you get shortcrust, not puff. Work quickly on a cool surface, and chill the dough 20-30 minutes whenever it softens or resists the pin.
- Weights to volume8 ounces of flour is about 1¾ cups scooped and levelled; 6 ounces of butter is 1½ sticks, or ¾ cup. Weighing is better here, since the flour-to-fat ratio is what makes the pastry rough puff rather than plain paste.
- The water quantity is understated"Rather more than a tablespoon" will not bring 8 ounces of flour together. Expect 4 to 6 tablespoons of ice water in total; the recipe's own instruction to add more "till it is a stiff paste" is the one to follow. Stop while the dough still looks slightly dry and shaggy.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, stronger than most modern all-purpose. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose works; bread flour gives a chewier, more elastic pastry and needs a longer rest between turns.
- The lemon juiceHalf a teaspoon of acid slightly relaxes the gluten so the dough rolls out without fighting back. It is optional but harmless, and a splash of white vinegar does the same thing.
- "Turning rough edges to right hand"Most likely means giving the packet a quarter turn after each fold in three, so the open edges face the same way every time; keeping that consistent helps the layers stack evenly. The recipe stops at four rollings; some modern versions go to five or six.
- Oven heat, since none is givenRough puff needs a hot oven to convert the water in the butter to steam before the fat melts out — 425-450F. A moderate oven will leach the butter and leave the pastry greasy and flat.
- YieldEnough for a double-crust nine-inch pie, two tart shells, or roughly a dozen turnovers. It keeps wrapped in the refrigerator for two days and freezes well.
The Five Roses Cook Book was a milling company's premium — Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal gathered recipes from Canadian housewives and gave the book away, or sold it for pennies, to households buying its flour. That commercial purpose explains why the flour is named by brand in the ingredient lists, this recipe included. Rough puff itself is the domestic compromise on classic puff pastry: instead of enclosing a block of butter in a dough envelope and rolling out six or more precise turns, the cook chops cold butter coarsely into the flour and lets the folding do the laminating. It appears as rough puff paste in nineteenth-century English household manuals, though its origins are often traced to French pastry practice.