Daring Bakers: Puff Pastry

The September 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.

When I learned about September's challenge I was both excited and frightened. You see, I love puff pastry, but have never thought about making it myself. Last weekend I decided to devote part of my Saturday to making the puff pastry and then bake it on Sunday.

If you want the exact recipe and directions, let me know and I'll send them to you: they are a bit too lengthy to post here.

Basically, you combine flour with water to make part of the dough. You then put flattened butter in the middle of the dough and close it up. Then roll it, fold it, roll it, refrigerate it, and repeat 6 times ;)

You then roll out the dough and cut out circles from it. Then you cut out a smaller circle out of the large ones and stack the "doughnut" shaped ones on top of full circles. Make some little holes in the full circle, brush everything carefully with an egg wash and bake. The dough rose in the oven quite a bit and was really flaky! (My pictures turned out ridiculously poor this time around.)

For the savory filling I made sauteed mushrooms with onion, bacon and thyme.

For the sweet filling, I used fresh figs, raspberries and home-made whipped cream.

I still have quite a bit of the dough in my freezer, so make sure to check back in at a later date for more puff pastry projects.