regarding puff pastry

We now have a new Christmas morning tradition thanks to the earlier thread about palmiers. This morning I took a puff pastry square (trader joe's) rolled it to a nice rectangle, spread it with softened butter, sprinkled with sugar/cinnamon and sprinkled that with nutmeg. Cut and left alone for 10 minutes or so to warm to room temp. Baked for 12 minutes at 400 and we have a new, never to be missed tradition enshrined.

The thing is, I really wanted to just work with the stuff, since I haven't much before. What I found was that contrary to pie dough which must be chilled before baking, the puff pastry won't puff if it's too cold. So, let it thaw just a little to roll it out. Fill it, form it, cut it then leave it alone for 10 - 15 minutes while it gets soft and warms to room temp. Then bake and -magic- it poofs beautifully.

Now I know

As a side note, the TJ's puff pastry tastes much better than the Pepperidge Farm. It's nearly as good as the (ridiculously priced) Dufour.

That sounds tasty!

[Jenise]

Yum, I never thought of doing that, Howard, but it would sure be a lot easier than making pie crust for pie crust cookies (same ingredients). Stuart, thanks for the tip on TJ's. I'll give this a try on New Years Day!

Stuart,

Is the TJ's puff pastry made with butter or vegetable oil? That, IMO, is the big difference between the Pepperidge Farm (which is very good) and Dufour (which is superb). Dufour is made from butter, and this is one of those cases where the fat that you use makes all the difference. The water content in butter, so often a drawback in cooking, here is a positive asset, as it provides much of the steam to make the pastry puff out.

In my experience, just which fat you use in cooking doesn't matter in many cases--vegetable oil, lard, clarified butter--it comes out only insignificantly different.

Pastry is the best case I can think of where it does matter, big time. In the example I'm most familiar with, a proper Chinese flaky curried meat pie can ONLY be made with lard. Use anything else, and the result will be unsatisfactory. Ditto the pie crust my mother makes. You have to use lard or solid vegetable fat--butter or oil won't work. French puff pastry is the third case. It really needs to be made with solid butter (i.e., not clarified). Pepperidge Farm uses vegetable oil, and while their product is better than I can manage with my own unskilled hands (and with a HELLUVA lot less effort!), it's not as good as what can be achieved using butter as the fat ingredient.

-Paul W.

That's exactly why it's better- TJ's is butter. Soy oil will at best be neutral, so PF is working at a disadvantage.

Excellent! I'll have to try out TJ's. I love Dufour's, but as you say, it's very expensive. I don't mind paying for quality, but when I can pay less for quality, that's even better.

Thanks for the tip, Stuart.

-Paul W.