Baking Bouchon - Recipe 14 & 15: Puff Pastry and Palmiers á la Framboise

I was so excited about making Puff Pastry!  This is one of the recipes in this book that made me want to bake my way through it.  The other is croissants, which is a similar type of thing.  Most people say that it's a total waste of time to make your own puff pastry and I'll admit it's a lot of work.  My rolling pin is tired.  Was it worth it?  Well, kind of...

I made these two recipes at the same time because making puff pastry and not doing anything with it is pretty anti-climactic.  By making the palmiers as the same time, I get to actually use the puff pastry dough.  These palmiers are essentially puff pastry sandwiches with raspberry jam.  I'm confused by why they're called palmiers because palmiers are supposed to be shaped like elephant ears.  These are just supposed to be squares.

The first thing I did was made the jam.  Can you believe I've never made jam or jelly before?  Weird.  It could be because I used to hate jam and jelly.  Actually, I loved it, then I hated it and now I like it again.  My mom says I ate apple jelly as a kid all the time.  Then I decided I hated it for about 20 years.  A couple of years ago I tried it again and could deal with it in small doses, with butter, on a hot biscuit.  I'm pretty sure you could put anything on a hot biscuit and it would taste good.


For my first run at jam, it was pretty easy although I think this version is way too sweet for everyday use.  The recipe in the cookbook calls for a prepared raspberry puree, which I didn't have so I made it myself by combining fresh raspberries, sugar and lemon juice in a pan and cooking it until the raspberries break down and straining it to get the seeds out.

That puree gets cooked with more sugar and pectin (a jelling powder), cooled and bam, you've got jam.

Now it's time for the main attraction... butter!  You can't make good puff pastry without good butter so I went for the real, European, extra butter fat kind this time.  Mmmmm.  The whole idea of puff pastry is to get really thin layers of dough alternating with really thin layers of butter.  When the butter layers melt in the oven, they create steam which makes it puff.

So, first you create a butter block - basically a 6x8 inch block of butter.  I know that is not an entirely helpful description but I don't know how else to explain it.  Just look at the picture.  Once you've got a relatively square block, it goes in the fridge.

The dough itself is relatively simple... water, vinegar, flour, salt and melted butter.   The vinegar is an interesting addition, but you can't taste it once the pastry comes together.  Apparently the vinegar makes for a more tender dough.

Once the butter block and the dough are thoroughly chilled, you roll out the dough and the butter gets wrapped completely in dough.  Like a dough blanket, which I think they should sell.  I would totally wrap myself in a dough blanket.

Then the dough/butter combo gets rolled out and folded into thirds.  Then you refrigerate it for 2 hours, roll it out again and fold it into thirds again.  You do this five times.  That's a grand total of 243 layers of butter!!!

Here's where things started to go wrong.  The baking instructions for the palmiers had me slicing off thin pieces of puff pastry and laying them on their sides to bake so they puff horizontally, not vertically.  This did NOT work for me.  Yes, it puffed horizontally but the layers didn't stick together, they just spread out and I couldn't pick the whole thing up, let alone make a sandwich out of it.

After the baking the first round, I cheated changed course and tried baking it in this square muffin tin that I have, hoping that by not letting it spread out so much it would stick together.  Also, an epic fail.  I can't tell you how grumpy this made me.  I worked so very hard on the puff pastry dough and I don't actually think there is anything wrong with it.  IT DID PUFF.  I must be misinterpreting something in the baking instructions here.

So, now I have a gazillion random pieces of puff pastry and a bunch of raspberry jam that I'm not sure what to do with.  The whole time I was contemplating what I was doing wrong, I kept eating little bits of pastry which gave me a raging, buttery stomach ache.  The stuff actually tastes really good but I can't very well just eat plain puff pastry for a week and I'm certainly not giving it away like I do most of my other baked goods.  What will people think of me?

CA says this is all part of the process but I can't help being a buttered up grumpster.

Julie