Paul Hollywood's Temperature Trick For Perfect Pastry
Have you ever baked a puff pastry? You've probably eaten the delicate baked good before. Puff pastry is a light, flaky, and unleavened bread you'd see in everything from beef Wellington to apple turnovers to pot pies. Puff pastries aren't especially complicated, but they do require prep work to make sure they come out of the oven with a firm, crispy quality to them. They also happen to a specialty of British chef and "The Great British Bake Off" host Paul Hollywood. On his official YouTube channel, Hollywood has a video guide to making sausage rolls where he shared some baking advice that could apply to any puff pastry.
According to Hollywood, getting a puff pastry just right involves quickly alternating between hot and cold temperatures. "If you can get your dough as cold as possible, as quickly as possible, then you'll end up with something that, when you put it in the oven, it'll just go 'boof' and explode in the oven." Here, exploding is good, because it means the laminated dough (meaning the dough is folded and layered with butter) rises into a light, airy, and firm final shape. When Hollywood is asked if this strategy makes the pastry crispier, he adds one important caveat. While the shock of high heat to cold dough is part of what makes the puff pastry crisp up, the recipe is also dependent on high quality butter.
Cold pastry dough and hot ovens
There's some food science behind this idea of chilling the dough before baking in a hot oven. It partly comes down to the butter, which needs to remain firm to help the pastry keep its flaky shape. If it's too lukewarm when it goes into the oven, it may melt and pool around the pastry instead of staying inside. The best way to keep your dough cold is simply to place it in the fridge (not the freezer) to stiffen it up before you bake. Beyond that and Hollywood's note about using quality butter, also be careful with the rolling pin, which can deflate puff pastries if you roll the edges.
It may not be complicated, but it still takes effort to get right. In fact, Hollywood's fellow judge on "The Great British Bake Off," celebrity chef and restaurateur Prue Leith, prefers store bought puff pastries because she feels they taste good enough to offset the laborious task of making them from scratch. Whether you side with Hollywood or Leith is up to you, but there is a similar cold and hot approach with store bought versions — however, make sure you thaw frozen pastries in the fridge before you bake them. They should be chilled, not freezing, when they hit the oven.