Puff pastry with bacon and cheese and chipotle in adobo

Seen on Lucy's Kitchen Notebook. Lucy is an American ex-pat living in Lyon, France. She's actually a bit more of a foodie than the French themselves generally and that's saying a lot. She tells a story of when commercial puff pastry was first introduced but not yet readily available. She quickly learned to distinguish and appreciate the difference between commercial and hand-made puff pastry and yearned for something better. She learned from a friend that she could buy a better product from the local bakery ready to use in her home creations and left commercial feuiletée behind. At a family gathering through some mistranslation it was passed around the party that she prepared the pastry herself from scratch for an apero she brought to the party. She says the guilt was so horrible she wanted to gather everybody to the center of the room and announce she did not fold the puff herself. She's hilarious. Then she lived with the tremendous burden of fraud for years following. Ha ha ha. That kills me. The years have taught her to forgive herself. But she resolved to master puff pastry without making a big deal about chilling the ingredients after pounding butter between each layer after tedious layer. This method takes advantage of one of several available shortcuts, and I must say the result is addictive. It's totally diet-worthy too, if your diet is for an underweight teenager still growing in search of calorie-dense meals in an attempt to add bulk.

Lucy emphasizes the reason this tastes better than anything you can buy is simple -- the butter. Commercial enterprises, even bakeries naturally seek ways to control costs. Use the best butter you have available and that will translate to extraordinary taste. Much better than anything you could possibly buy, and when it comes to providing hospitality to the polite people of California, Colorado, Arizona, and North Carolina and Ohio, and Lyon, the food cognoscenti will know.

No they won't. They don't know nuth'n.

Lucy calls this Feuilletage, Cheese and Bacon Biscuits. Feuillet = leaf.

Here's Lucy's recipe:

a) Keep everything cold, but do not bother to chill between layers.
b) Select butter with some care. Any butter will be better than the strange combination of non-butter chemicals used in commercial puff pastry, but you're in for a real treat by choosing an excellent unsalted butter.
c) Start to finish 10 minutes.
d) Good with Champagne or beer
e) Combine:

1) 125 g. A/P flour
2) 140 g. butter
3) large pinch of salt
4) large chipotle pepper in adobo (Comes in tiny cans. Use just one large chile or a few small ones. Not the whole can.)
5) few slices of thick bacon
6) 30 g. sharp cheese like cheddar
7) 30 g. Swiss cheese like Emmenthal
8) 60 g. VERY COLD water by weight.

You know what? This makes a decent batch but hardly enough. Let's go ahead and double it. In Avoirdupois this time. Avoirdupois, man, that irony sure can be ironic.

1) 9 oz. flour. This is a little over two cups by volume. More flour is used for the work surface that gets incorporated between the layers, it's part of what adds to the flake, flake, flakiness.
2) 10 oz. butter. This is a little over one cup by volume. You'll notice, by weight slightly more butter than flour.
3) 1/2 teaspoon salt. This assumes you're using unsalted butter.
4) 2 large chipotle chiles in adobe or up to six small ones, finely diced.
5) 5 or 6 thick slices of bacon, fried crisp and finely chopped.
6) 2-3 oz. sharp cheddar
7) 2-3 oz. Swiss cheese
8) 1/2 cup near-freezing cold water


As usual, rapidly rub cold butter into salted flour. Use a machine if you want, but why bother? It's fun to just smash the butter with your fingertips and coat each smashed particle with flour. Keep doing that until the butter is thoroughly combined into the butter and the flour is totally butterfied. Shred the cheese and add that too. Combine completely. Add most of the water, reserving about 1/4. Combine without kneading the flour until the water is evenly distributed. Keep adding the water until the mass comes together but not beyond. Use your dough-making judgment here along with a little common sense.

Roll out the dough mass on a generously floured work surface into a rectangle to between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thickness. Fold in thirds and roll flat again. Fold in thirds and roll flat again. That's twice. Do that twice again. Just for fun. Do it again. Finally, roll into a rectangle again. Spread the bacon and the chipotle evenly across the surface. Roll up one edge traveling across the flattened mass into a log shape. Cut the log into discs about 1/2 inch thick. Place on a baking sheet 2 inches apart (I use parchment paper or Silpat). Bake at 400°F until brown.

I made these a couple of times. I'm telling you, people cannot keep off them.

Sausage roll, homemade sausages, puff pastry, tomato sauce

For my sausage these are the meats that I had on hand so these are the meats that I used. I also have bacon, bacon fat and duck fat. 

It is the end of the season and I am long on herbs. These are all from the terrace, mint, cilantro, basil and parsley. 

My own sourdough pieces baked to dryness like commercial panko.

Sauce: 

Tin of San Marzano tomatoes

olive oil

Onion

Garlic

Bay leaf

chile flakes

wine

Heat olive oil, cook onion and garlic. When done and at risk of burning pour some tomato sauce or a single tomato into the pan and allow it to singe and spatter and burn onto areas of the pot even while it protects the garlic and onion from further burning as the mass turns to thick sludge. 

Clear it off with wine.

Dump in the tin of tomatoes without breaking them up.

Refrigerator or freezer is rearranged to accommodate a baking tray flatly.

The dough is yeast dough with baking soda to change the ph and salt but no butter this time. 

A sheet of butter 2/3 the size of the sheet pan is created by melting one stick of butter in the microwave to liquid. A sheet of plasticine wrap covers a baking tray for ease of butter-sheet removal and the tray is set inside the freezer or refrigerator.

Melted butter is poured over the frozen metal tray and plastic to 2/3 the size of the tray. The tray is so cold the butter begins to slow and thicken immediately. It needn't be poured all at once. The butter slab can be created in multiple pours much like dipping a candle. Finally a usable sheet of butter is created that is cold enough to be lifted from its tray by the plastic and set on cold yeast dough rolled flatly to the full size of its own tray. The edges of the plastic are used to lift the sheet of frozen butter and flip it onto the cold dough rolled out the full size of the baking tray, The frozen butter slab arranged on top of the rolled dough so that 1/3 of the dough is uncovered. The plastic pulled off. That naked third is folded over the center buttered third (and presenting an unbuttered top). Then the end butter third is folded over the whole thing. Boom. Three layers of flake with two lawyers of butter just like that.

Chill.

Roll out to the size of the tray. Fold in thirds. 

Roll out to the size of the tray. Fold in thirds.

That déjà vu thing is happening again, really hard this time.

Chill.

Roll out to the size of the tray. Fold in thirds.

I had a hard time deciding what type of dough to use. I prefer something easy, and I'm glad I decided on puff pastry. Puff pastry is the way to go. 

This form of puff is how croissants are made. Again, it is a plain yeast dough, not a short dough like regular puff. The plain yeast dough would have been fine by itself without all that extra butter for flake pastry and puff pastry, like a hotdog bun around a sausage. That is what the refrigerator dough is like. (I presume, I never ate one) A short dough like a flaky pie crust dough would work too just as well. Especially if folded in layers. All of them are used.

But, of the choices, puff pastry is quite incredible. It makes the whole thing fun to eat. Flakes all over the place.

Americans have their pigs in a blanket, usually a hotdog rolled into refrigerator dinner roll dough that comes in a tube that you hit firmly and resolutely on a table edge causing the unique packaging, weaker along a spiral, to explode open, as the whole thing is under pressure especially if the cylinder has been sitting around at room temperature.  It is the most fun thing about the refrigerator doughs that come in a tube, or one of the most terrifying things about them. It's all fun and games until someone puts an eye out. 

The hotdog rolled in refrigerator dough has an hor d'oeuvres version made of miniature franks that come in a jar or a tin and the same refrigerator dough. These are often the top item in a person's repertoire for hor d'oeuvres for entertaining or for satisfying a pot luck requirement, and that top position is reinforced when their family and friends and coworkers tell them how delicious they are. 

But see the carelessness in choice of ingredients there? 

The original idea was careless: sausage in dough. Hastily constructed from convenient ingredients and served in pubs.

The idea is hardly unique. Corn dog. Chinese sausage buns. Egg rolls. Pierogi. Ravioli.  

This is Gordon Ramsey on a panel of judges for Masterchefs remarking on this gentleman's sausage roll.

Apple turnovers with homemade puff pastry

1 + 1/2 cup white flour

2 tablespoons cold butter

1/2 cup ice cold water, thereabout, unmeasured actually

scant cinnamon

scant clove

scant salt

scant white sugar

Dough wrapped in plastic, rested, chilled.

Melted butter spread onto plastic sheet and frozen.

Frozen butter on cold dough. 

I erred by not allowing the butter to soften sufficiently. It must be pliable so that it stretches. This was too frozen to stretch. Butter shards poked through. Eh, live and learn.

It is possible the butter sheet is too cold. Imagine that. If the butter is too soft then it mixes with the dough and that will work as dough container, as pie crust, but not as puff pastry. For puff, fat must spread between layers. 

Folded and rolled flat several times. 

Four small apples of various types chopped to bits.

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon clove

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 tablespoon white sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon butter.

Notice butter mixed the dough, more butter between layers of dough, and even more butter in the apple mixture.

Painted with cream this time instead of egg wash. Egg is probably better.

Baked 400℉ for 17-20 minutes.

Puff pastry strips

The last time I made blueberry turnovers the scraps were also baked. Those were around for a couple of days and I ate them one by one. I kept thinking each time this would be a good idea. Just the pastry. It's very dry and crumbly. It's fascinating the way the flakes dissolve in your mouth. And if flour and butter doesn't' stick to my ribs then nothing will.

↓ This is one stick of melted butter poured onto a plastic-covered tray and chilled.

Quiche

This pie dough is treated as a puff pastry, but it doesn't have to be. The process shown here can be skipped. For an ordinary dough, rapidly rub in the fat, then add just enough liquid to bring the dough together. You can add an egg yolk if you wish but that is not necessary either. What is necessary is allowing the dough to rest, to autolyse during that period, which also gives time for water molecules to migrate evenly throughout the dough without developing the gluten molecules by kneading. The fat chills back to fully solid state. These patient steps help reduce shrinking after the dough is rolled whether or not it is layered as puff. 

But in this case, an egg yolk is used (a partial egg yolk because the dough ball is smaller than normal). This dough is layered, spread with room-temperature butter, then returned to the refrigerator to chill. The aim is to get the butter between the layers without it actually becoming mixed within the dough itself, that is, to maintain separate discrete layers of butter and dough (which already has its own internal butter particles coated with flour). This is the two attack flake system. 

The dough is rolled out one final time, and chilled again. After being chilled, it is tucked into a pie pan, without stretching, trimmed, and returned to chill one last time. 

Before being placed in the oven the dough is fitted with a parchment paper disc cut to fit, and lightly weighted with beans to counteract the dough's tendency to bubble and rise. This dough is not docked because eventually it will contain a liquid center.  The pie crust is baked at high heat for 10 minutes. 

The pie crust is painted with egg white to waterproof its surface and baked at moderate heat for another eight minutes or so, just long enough to bake the egg-washed surface. Now waterproofed, the pie crust is filled, first with solid ingredients including chunks of cheese, and then with an egg yolk/cream combination to fill in the spaces. 

The filling can be anything  and so can the cheese. A typical quiche Lorraine will have a filling of bacon with specifically Gruyere Swiss cheese and a liquid portion rich with egg yolks, up to a dozen for a nine-inch pan, but it is not required that the filling be that rich. Whole eggs can be used along with whole milk rather than cream. 

This pie is Black Forest sandwich ham cut thickly, asparagus, mushrooms and onion, along with a broad assortment of various cheeses all with different melting properties, (not really recommended because it is overly complex and a bit confusing, but I like that), and six jumbo egg yolks mixed with condensed milk, for a  seven-inch pie. Quite a lot going on there for a tiny pie. There was excess liquid filler. 

There was also excess dough. None of it was discarded. The surplus dough was cut into pieces, painted with the same egg white used to waterproof the pie crust, then dusted with refined sugar. 

The dough contains salt and pepper and sage because it is  dough for a savory pie, but none of that interfered with these portions that are more like cookies. In fact, this dough as it is does make excellent cookies. They could be further enhanced with more sugar between layers, cinnamon, fruit preserves, and the like, but I enjoyed these pieces a lot with just a tiny amount of sprinkled sugar baked onto the egg white wash. They are light and airy and delicate. 

Feuilletage rapide

Feuilletage expliquée en photos. Puff pastry the quick way.  Do this. You'll blow away your guests and there will be no point in ever buying another packet of commercial puff again. There simply is no comparison between real butter and whatever that grease is that industry uses.  It's easy as eating pie, and it's fun. Plus you get to make a giant mess.

Now there are three layers. Roll out flat and fold again for six layers.  Do that two more times for twelve layers.  The flexible cutting surface makes a convenient sizer.

Smear on two diced chipotle peppers and enough of the adobo sauce to imitate a simple pizza. Add diced bacon.

The batch made two rolls.  These will be cut into thin discs and baked.  

These ↑ are from a previous party described here.