Rough Puff Pastry

If you love to bake, pastry dough recipes are great ones to return to again and again to try in different ways and perfect over time. A rough puff pastry is essentially a no-frills way to make quick dough. There is little mixing involved, so the process is fairly easy, but you end up with a buttery, flaky pastry.

Dough like this is great for hand pies, tarts, or other small baked goods. Add cold cubes of butter and ice cold water to your dry ingredients to create the dough. Since there are so few ingredients in this recipe, a good butter will really help the flavor.

This recipe is similar to how you would make a pie dough, except you fold this rough puff dough over itself again and again, rolling it each time. That’s what helps create the puff part once baked. Dough for pies are also treated more delicately than this puff pastry. There is more care involved when making a pie crust while this recipe is a rough dough for a reason—it does not need to be so perfect.

Taking care of your butter will be the most important part of the recipe. You don’t want your butter to melt before it goes in the oven, so it’s best to cube really cold butter. At different steps in the recipe, cover your dough or wrap it in plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes to keep the butter properly chilled.

Editorial contributions by Keaton Larson