Baking Bouchon - Recipe 50: Pear Feuillette

Some days when I'm baking out of this cookbook I feel like I am in French class.  Feuillette is French for puffy pastry... so basically these are pear turnovers.

I didn't have any puff pastry frozen so I had to make it again.  I went ahead and made a couple of batches so that I have enough for the rest of the puff pastry recipes in the cookbook.

Making the pastry takes much longer than making the desserts themselves.  It's really a three day process of refrigerating and rolling and refrigerating some more.  I'm glad I don't have to make it again although I took a sneak peak at the croissant recipes that follow and it looks like a pretty similar process so I'm in for a lot more rolling and refrigerating.

The pears in this dessert are poached in white wine - which is awesome.  I was actually really surprised by the poaching process because I was under the impression that in order to poach something the liquid needed to be hot.  This is not.  Wine, water and sugar are heated together to melt the sugar, then lemon juice it added and the mixture is cooled.  After it's cooled it gets combined with the pears.  Isn't that wrong?  I'm not aware of the technical definition of poaching but this doesn't sound like it.  This just sounds like soaking. 

The other component of this dessert is almond cream which is a combination of almond flour, regular flour, butter, powdered sugar and eggs.

To assemble these little guys you place a dollop of almond cream on top of the puff pastry, top that with some poached pears and then another layer of pastry.

Full disclosure that these are supposed to be in the shape of pears and they're supposed to have a beautiful lattice shape on top.  I was unable to do either because I didn't have a pear shaped cutter or a lattice cutter.  I attempted to freehand the lattice but the holes ended up being too big.  So I changed course and used a straw to cut little holes in the lids.  That ended up working pretty well even if they look like turtles.

The pastries get topped with some egg wash to encourage browning and we're ready to bake.

I get super nervous every time I bake my own puff pastry.  I'm convinced that it won't "puff" but it usually does despite my worrying.

These were super tasty.  Surprisingly, you really can taste the wine in the poached pear.  Plus, puff pastry tastes like butter... so there's that.  The almond cream is actually a really important component because it keeps the whole thing moist.

CA liked them too - I think he ate more of them than I did.  That's usually a good sign.


Enjoy!
Julie