Puff, THE MAGIC pastry
Create masterpieces — both sweet and savory — with miraculous dough
Ionce made puff pastry from scratch. That’s why I now buy it at the store.
When done right, puff pastry is almost supernatural. You take a thin, flat piece of dough, bake it, and it puffs up into a work of art many times its original size, with hundreds of the thinnest, flakiest, most delicate layers of pastry suspended ethereally in its buttery goodness. All that, and it’s delicious, too. Making it at home takes time, dedication and not an inconsiderable amount of effort. And until you develop the right touch for it, you can end up (like I did) with a flat, leaden plank of pastry. Mine was buttery, but it wasn’t puffy at all.
So I take the store-bought shortcut, and I am not ashamed. You can find puff pastry in the freezer section of your local grocery store.
Once you get it, the question isn’t what you can do with it, the question is what can’t you do with it. It’s good for sweet dishes and for savory, you can use it for appetizers and desserts, and Beef Wellington just wouldn’t be Beef Wellington without it.
I used it for four dishes and could not have been happier about the way they turned out. Whether the recipes were ridiculously simple (ahem, doughnuts) or somewhat more complicated (chicken pot pie), the storebought puff pastry made making them easy.
And they all tasted great.
Yield: 4 servings
3 cups water, plus more for brushing
¾ cup plus ½ tablespoon granulated sugar, divided
½ vanilla bean, split 4 Bartlett or Bosc pears, cored and peeled ½ cup heavy cream ½ (17.3-ounce) package (1 sheet) frozen puff pastry, thawed
1 cup fresh raspberries
Heat the water, ¾ cup of the sugar and vanilla bean in a 2-quart saucepan over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved, stirring occasionally.
Add the pears and cook for 10 minutes or until tender, turning occasionally. Remove pears from pan, leaving the sugar mixture in the saucepan. Cover pears and refrigerate 1 hour or until they are cold.
Stir cream into the saucepan. Bring to a simmer and cook until the mixture is reduced to about ¾ cup, stirring often. Remove the vanilla bean pieces; if desired, scrape their seeds into the sauce. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Unfold the pastry sheet on a lightly floured surface. Cut the sheet lengthwise into 8 strips. Brush the strips with water and sprinkle with about half of the remaining ½ tablespoon sugar.
Press the ends of 2 pastry strips together. Starting at the top, wind 1 pastry strip around 1 pear, slightly overlapping the edges of the pastry and tucking the end under the pear (if necessary, use a toothpick to hold the strip in place). Repeat with the remaining pears and pastry strips. Place the wrapped pears onto a baking sheet and sprinkle with remaining ¼ tablespoon of sugar. Bake 25 minutes or until the pastries are golden brown. Spoon the vanilla sauce onto 4 plates. Top each with 1 pear and garnish with the raspberries.
PER SERVING: 626 calories; 34 g fat; 26 g saturated fat; 41 mg cholesterol; 10 g protein; 96 g carbohydrate; 60 g sugar; 9 g fiber; 239 mg sodium; 48 mg calcium.
— Adapted from Pepperidge Farm