Rough Puff Pastry

What Is Rough Puff Pastry?

Rough puff pastry is also known as quick pastry and become really popular with professionals and home bakers because you get bakery-style puff pastry without precise shaping and laminating butter with dough. Cookbook author and chef Claire Saffitz has a wonderful recipe for it. The trick is to work large pieces of cold butter into dry ingredients and hydrate it all with ice cold water (as if you were making pie crust). Sometimes bakers grate butter into the mix or use a food processor. There’s lots of ways to make rough puff pastry.

With this recipe, I stick with cold cubes of butter and use my hands to rub the butter into the flour mixture. Your hands are your best tool and method here because it’s nearly impossible to over-mix the dough this way. If the dough is over-mixed and you break down the butter too much, you’ll lose layers.

  • Can I use a food processor, pastry cutter, or other mixer? I do not recommend it. These tools slice down the butter too much and you’ll lose a lot of flaky layers. I tried and it’s not worth it because the result is closer to a greasy pie dough than a layered puff pastry. (Still good, but not the goal here.)

Rough Puff Pastry Details

  • Taste: Buttery, hardly sweetened, a little salty.
  • Texture: Ahh, the best part. Each bite has oodles of crispy, crackly layers of light and buttery pastry. This pastry is one of the FLAKIEST doughs I’ve ever worked with and comes close to croissants territory. (But made in a fraction of the time!)
  • Ease: I categorize this as an intermediate baking recipe. While it’s not nearly as involved as homemade croissants or homemade cruffins, it’s certainly not as easy as using store-bought frozen puff pastry. You need to flatten and fold the dough 6x, but there’s no chilling between each time so the recipe moves quicker than traditional homemade puff pastry.
  • Time: The dough requires 2 separate refrigeration steps, but the 2nd one is only 15 minutes. You can easily make this dough in a few hours or over the course of 2 days. I always appreciate make-ahead dough where you have plenty of options in terms of timing. You can also freeze the dough, too.

Just 5 Ingredients in the Rough Puff Dough

This shortcut pastry dough comes together with flour, sugar, salt, cold butter, and cold water.

  • Why do the butter and water have to be cold? It’s important for the butter to stay cold so it doesn’t melt and soak up all the flour. We want the butter to stay solidified as we roll, shape, fold, and flatten this dough because if it melts before baking, you lose all the flakes. Game over. You see, when the butter melts in the oven, it creates steam and that steam separates the dough into multiple flaky layers. Cold butter is what makes cheddar biscuits and scones flakey too!

Rolling & Folding

Step by step photos of this process are below the recipe.

After you prepare the dough and chill it in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours (1st refrigeration), you will begin rolling it out with a rolling pin and folding it like a business letter, rolling it out again, folding again, and so on. You will roll + fold it a total of 6 times before refrigerating again for at least 15 minutes (2nd refrigeration).

The photo below shows what the center of your dough looks like after all the rolling and folding. *Note that I sliced a sliver off the end so I could show you this!

Uses for This Rough Puff Dough

After the 2nd refrigeration, you can use this dough for:

Handmade Puff Pastry (Rough Puff Method)

5 Stars 4 Stars 3 Stars 2 Stars 1 Star 4.9 from 50 reviews
  • Author: Sally McKenney
  • Prep Time: 3 hours
  • Cook Time: 0 minutes
  • Total Time: 3 hours
  • Yield: about 1 lb. (454g) dough

Use this in-depth tutorial to learn how to make a from-scratch puff pastry dough variation. The homemade dough comes together using a “rough puff” method where you carefully work butter into your dry ingredients and then fold and flatten the dough many times to create countless flaky layers. Make sure you start with very cold butter. This recipe is also in my cookbook, Sally’s Baking 101.

Ingredients

  • 1 and 1/3 cups (167g) all-purpose flour (spooned & leveled), plus more as needed
  • 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 cup (12 Tbsp; 170g) unsalted butter, very cold and cubed
  • 6–8 Tablespoons (90–120g/ml) ice-cold water

 

Instructions

    1. Make the dough: In a large bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, and salt together. Place the cold and cubed butter on top. Gently toss the flour and butter together with your hands, and then briefly rub the butter into the flour to begin combining them, as you can see in the video tutorial. You do not want to break down the butter too much in this step. I do not recommend a food processor, pastry cutter, or mixer for this step because it will break down the butter too much.
    1. At this point, the butter is still in large cubes/chunks. Begin adding the ice-cold water, 1 Tablespoon (15g/ml) at a time, using your hands to toss the mixture together after each addition. (I usually start with 2 Tablespoons of water before I begin tossing together.) You can use a spatula or spoon for tossing, but I really do recommend your hands so you get a good feel of the dough. As the dough begins to hydrate after about 4 Tablespoons of water, you can start lightly squeezing or clumping the dough together with your hands to help bring it together. Mixture will still be very shaggy, as you can see in the video and photos. If your dough feels sticky and wet before adding 6 Tablespoons of water, mix in 1 Tablespoon of flour (your butter was likely too warm—you can continue with the recipe, but the dough may not be as flaky).
    2. Pour the shaggy clump of dough out onto a lightly floured work surface. There should still be large chunks of butter at this point. With lightly floured hands, begin patting the dough down until it’s 3/4–1 inch thick, about a 5×8-inch rectangle. Fold the dough into thirds as if you were folding a business letter. Use your hands to gently flatten and smooth out any cracks in your dough. Wrap it tightly in plastic wrap or parchment paper, or place into an airtight container.
    3. 1st refrigeration: Refrigerate the dough for at least 2 hours and up to 24 hours.
  1. Roll & Fold: Take the dough out of the refrigerator to begin the “rolling and folding” process. If the dough chilled for longer than about 3 hours, it’s likely very stiff, so let it rest for about 5 minutes before you begin rolling. Lightly flour a work surface. The dough gets sticky, so make sure you have more flour nearby as you roll and fold. Using lightly floured hands, gently flatten the dough into a small square. Using a rolling pin, roll the dough into a rectangle that’s 1/2 inch thick, about 6×12 inches. The exact dimensions are not important, but the thickness is. As you roll, it’s best to flip the dough over once or twice to make sure it’s not sticking to your work surface. Lightly flour your work surface as needed. Fold the rectangle into thirds as if it were a business letter. (See photos and video tutorial.) Turn it 90 degrees and roll it out into a 1/2-inch-thick rectangle again. Fold into thirds again. Turn it 90 degrees. You’ll repeat rolling and folding 4 more times for a total of 6 times.
  2. 2nd Refrigeration: Wrap the dough tightly and refrigerate for at least 15 minutes and up to 24 hours before using in your recipe. You can also freeze the dough at this point. See Notes.
  3. Use wherever you would use frozen store-bought puff pastry. To bake plain, roll pastry dough into a 10×16-inch rectangle and place on a lined baking sheet. Brush all over with egg wash (1 large egg whisked with 1 Tbsp milk), and bake at 400°F (204°C) until golden brown and puffy, about 25–28 minutes.

Notes

  1. Make Ahead & Freezing Instructions: Prepare as instructed in steps 1–3. At this point the dough can be refrigerated up to 24 hours (see step 4). You can also prepare the dough through step 5. At this point the dough can be refrigerated for up to another 24 hours (see step 6). During or after this second chilling time, you could also freeze the dough for up to 1 month. (I don’t recommend freezing the dough before the rolling and folding step.) Thaw overnight in the refrigerator before using in a recipe that calls for 1 lb. puff pastry dough (or 1 store-bought package with 2 sheets puff pastry).

Find it online: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/rough-puff-pastry/

 

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