Rough Puff
Ingredients.
Eight ounces of Flour.
Six ounces of Butter.
Salt. Half a teaspoonful of Lemon-juice.
Put the butter and flour on a paste-board, chop up the butter in the flour, heap it all up on the board, make a well in the centre, put in the lemon-juice, and sprinkle the salt over. Take a full tablespoonful of cold water, and mix it slowly and lightly with your fingers into the flour and butter, adding more water if necessary until you get a stiff paste. Roll this out, fold it over in half, turn it with the rough edges towards you, roll it and fold it again; repeat this twice more, so that it is rolled out and folded four times in all. It is now ready for use for a meat pie, apple tart, or tartlets.
A classic rough puff in the Victorian ratio of three parts flour to two parts butter. The recipe assumes a cold marble slab, cold hands and no refrigerator, which is where most modern attempts go wrong.
- WeightsEight ounces of flour is about 225 g; six ounces of butter about 170 g. Use plain (all-purpose) flour and unsalted butter straight from the fridge, cut into rough cubes rather than grated.
- The hinge: keep the butter in pieces"Chop up the butter in the flour" does not mean rub it in. The butter should stay in visible flakes the size of small beans; those flakes are what steam apart into layers. Once the butter smears, you have a short crust, not a puff.
- Water"A full tablespoonful" is only a start. Expect 4 to 5 tablespoons (60-75 ml) of ice water in total for this quantity, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres. It should look shaggy and slightly dry rather than smooth.
- SaltNo quantity is given. Half a teaspoon is right for 225 g of flour, whether the pastry is going under meat or apples.
- Lemon juiceThe acid slightly slackens the gluten and makes the dough easier to roll without shrinking back. Half a teaspoon is enough; it will not be tasted.
- RestingThe original expects four turns in one go, which works in a cold Victorian larder. In a warm kitchen, chill the dough for 20 minutes after the second turn, and again before rolling out for use, or the butter will melt into the flour.
- OvenThe recipe gives no baking instructions; it ends with the raw paste. As modern guidance, rough puff wants a hot oven to set the layers before the butter runs: 425-450F (220-230C) for the first 15 minutes, dropping to 375F (190C) if the filling needs longer.
- YieldAbout 450 g of pastry, enough to cover a family-sized meat pie or a 9-inch tart, or to make roughly 18 small tartlets.
Rough puff, sometimes called half-puff and related to the French "demi-feuilletee", is the working cook's shortcut to the laminated pastry of the pastry-chef: instead of enclosing a block of butter in a dough envelope and giving it six careful turns, the butter is simply chopped through the flour and the layers are built by rolling and folding. It appears in many late nineteenth-century British cookery manuals, and suited the kitchen of a modest household, where the same pastry had to serve a beefsteak pie on Monday and an apple tart on Sunday. The instruction to work on a board rather than in a bowl reflects the period's marble or scrubbed-deal slabs and the constant preoccupation with keeping everything cold.