pavlovcat's Journal

So maybe my technique needs a little work...
Nov 01 2009 15:33

I decided to make danish this weekend to break in my new granite counters.  This story perfectly illustrates the difference between my hypothetical chat pastries and real life.

Saturday I made the pastry, pastry cream (so easy and so evil!) and remonce (almond cream filling).  That went great.  The actual making of the pastry itself - a cross between a yeast bread and a puff pastry - also seemed to go wonderfully.  And then came assembly and final rise on Sunday, which was one WTF moment after another.

I rolled out the dough to a 6x17 inch rectangle, cut it in half lengthwise, spread the remonce on one half and sandwiched it with the other half of dough and then rolled it back out to the 6x17 size.  At which point all the remonce smooshed out onto the counters. 

Aw hell no, was my response to that.  I wasn't going to let the almondy goodness go to waste.  So I peeled off the top layer of dough, re-spread the remonce and then tried to be more careful rolling it back out.  Heh.  Okay.  So only 1/2 the remonce ended up on the counter this time and that was mainly due to the fact that I stopped rolling it out before it reached the right size. 

By this time, pretty much every surface in my immediate vicinity was covered in remonce.  So I moved the rolled out dough onto a piece of waxed paper and put it in the fridge since I had handled it too much and it was now quite soft.  I then cleaned the counter and prepared to twist and shape the dough.  Only to discover that the dough was now firmly adhered to the wax paper.  This is bad.  Puff pastry needs all its layers intact in order to puff.  Keeping the layers intact is sorta difficult when half the layers remain on the wax paper so that I have to scrap it off and try to mash it back with the remaining dough.

Finally got it shaped and covered it with saran wrap and put it in a warm oven to rise, per the recipe.  Went out to run errands.  Came back to find the butter had leaked out of the pastry.  Not a good sign since the layers of butter are what make it puff, but they looked great otherwise.  So I took them out, started filling them with pastry cream and homemade apricot jam.  Didn't have enough apricot jam, so half of them ended up pastry cream only.

And then I preheated the oven.  And then the oven started smoking.  And smoking.  And also smoking.  Apparently the butter that had leaked out had dripped onto the floor of the oven underneath the baking stone, so I hadn't seen it.  Now the smoke detectors are going off and I come to the sad realization that there's no way I can bake these danish in my smoking oven.

So I call my brother who I know for a fact is over at my parents' house to ask him to preheat the oven there because I now have to do an across town trek with my poor, pathetic pastry before they self-destruct.  Brother won't answer his cell phone or my parents' land line.  Evil brother.

Grab the pans of pastry and put them carefully in my car and crank the air conditioner so I don't lose even more butter.  Take the first corner and a tupperware container goes flying across the back seat and lands on the danish.  Now they are all mushed and misshapen.  Arrive at my parents' house to find my brother sitting in the dining room eating breakfast at 3:00 p.m. because he just woke up after a Halloween bender.  Evil brother.

Preheat the oven.  Put the pans of pastry in the freezer to try and maintain some of the puff.  Finally pop them in the oven. 

There was no puff.

Don't get me wrong, they're delicious and the pastry is very tender.  But there is no puff.

After two failed attempts, puff pastry has become my nemesis.  I will now be forced to make it regularly until I get it right.  Which means I will be unable to eat anything except lettuce in order to compensate for the enormous amount of butter I will be consuming in my quest for the perfect puff pastry.

Picture of finished product in my gallery.