Pastry Therapy

I make pastry so often not because I love the taste of it (which, incidentally, I do). I make pastry because I find the whole process soothing. The cutting-in of butter into flour, the trickling of a well-judged quantity of liquid, enough to just moisten and bind the little lumps, the gentle massing together of the clumps - I find these actions, a series of small steps carefully performed, therapeutic. I could, of course, let the mixer do everything for me. But why rob myself of the pleasure of touching the dough? Pastry, on the receiving end, responds well to the human touch (albeit a light and tender one). In the wee hours of the morning, W has on occasion walked into the kitchen, groggy from having just awoken, to find me flour-covered and butter-smeared - when I simply can't fall asleep, I make pastry. Which suits pastry just fine - there's no environment more nurturing than the nocturnal cool.

It's incredible how the exact same ingredients - butter and flour - can be transformed into products as myriad as pate brisee, pate sablee, and pate feuilletee, depending on the manner in which you've handled the dough, and the addition of other ingredients like sugar and eggs.

Of the various pastry doughs I enjoy making, pate feuilletee, or puff pastry, is the most challenging, and all the more enjoyable for it. A magical construct, this laminated dough comprises of many alternating sheets of paper-thin dough interleaved with equally thin sheets of butter, created through the layering process of making turns, or rolling and folding.

I didn't always feel this way about puff pastry - I've been reduced to tears by misbehaving dough more than I care to remember. But the more you practise, the more you intuitively understand how to avoid potential pitfalls. In this lies part of the gratification - the more you make it, the more you're better at it. No other pastry teaches you the virtue of patience like puff pastry does. Be impatient, or brutalise the dough, and puff pastry will retaliate by being cantankerous, a true nightmare to work with. Be patient, and meticulously accord every detail of the process the care it deserves, and puff pastry will reward by magnificiently rising in the heat of the oven, its airily delicate yet meltingly crisp layers a true pleasure to eat.

Julia Child and Simone Beck's Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol.II thoroughly describes the minutiae of the pate feuilletee process, with illustrations thrown in for added clarity. I recently bought a copy of Sherry Yard's fabulous book, The Secrets of Baking, and looked up her method (I do this with every baking book I buy - it's fascinating how every author has a different trick or enlightening fact to share), which is wonderfully detailed. As of late, thanks to my compulsive preoccupation with Pierre Herme (what a hero!), I've been using his Inside-Out Puff Pastry recipe (found in both his Chocolate Desserts and Desserts titles). His ingenious method defies conventional logic by placing the bulk of the butter on the outside, thus literally inverting the classic encasement of the beurre de tourage by the detrempe. On paper, it sounds like it would never work, but work it does, and does so beautifully.