Golden Puffy Crisp Life

Puff pastry.

            Even the words are effervescent in a Dom Perignon, I-taste-stars kind of way. If Katherine Hepburn were the product of an oven, she’d be puff pastry: at once aristocratic and sensuous, golden exterior simultaneously crusty and delicate, shattering into glorious shards of deliciousness to reveal a superlatively soft interior. Puff pastry. Cue violin crescendo.

            Buying the frozen product is, while not unpleasant, not glamorous either. Dedicating a whole day to the production of puff pastry is the ultimate in self-indulgence. Landscape-sized quantities of butter are frozen, powdered with the softest flour and pummeled into submission, a process that more closely resembles a really bad love affair than baking.

            When making puff pastry, make a double batch and use a fabulous recipe (I use Julia Childs’).  It really is a lot of effort and besides, while for some folks cheesy macaroni or fabulous chicken soup is the ultimate in comfort food, the knowledge that homemade puff pastry is held in frosty stasis in the freezer will be a glowing ember in your mind.

            Freeze the completed dough in creamy individual portions; you can always move more than one from the freezer to the fridge to thaw, and the ability to move just one bestows the freedom to use one for any reason or no reason but pure pleasure.

            Pop a glorious top on creamed chicken and vegetables for the chicken pot pie of the gods; surround a square of chocolate; marry it to a sliver of silken brie and some tangy fruit; or, simply bake as a croissant.

                        When making puff pastry, the key to perfection is to start with frozen butter and to never, ever let it be less than cold until the actual baking.

            (Some people insist on cold flour and cold bowl. I myself find that a little twee.)

            The idea is to infuse the flour with tiny bits of frozen butter. When the pastry is baked, the butter melts into the flour, leaving tiny caverns of delight that surround fragrant air. The air inflates in the heat, and the pastry bakes around it, leaving myriad bubbles of buttery magic.

            The scent of baked puff pastry lingers long after the process is complete. Here resides, it proclaims, a baker.

            Puff pastry (even the Pepperidge Farm kind) is, I think, an invention of the gods. Enjoy!