Pastry

Preparation time: 15 mins (plus chilling). Cooking time 20 minutes.

Pastry is a blend of fat and flour held together with a liquid. So this is the starting point for umpteen variants some of which I’ll mention below. Common wisdom, so they tell me, is that this should be done as quickly and coldly as possible but my Grandmother used to make excellent pastry sat by the side of a coal fire watching the TV taking her time. I do believe, however, that overworking the pastry for example bundling together the offcuts and re-rolling or stretching the pastry activates the gluten apparently and the pastry goes hard – and by hard I mean hard.

Ingredients

• 120g plain flour
• pinch of salt
• 60g cold butter cut into      cubes (I cut it into 1 cm cubes and put back into the fridge)
• 2-3 tbsp cold water

Preparation method

1. Put the flour and salt in a large bowl and add the cubes of butter.
2. Use your fingertips to rub the butter into the flour until you have a mixture that resembles coarse      breadcrumbs.
3. Optionally – pulse blitz in a food processor to get the same effect – don’t overdo it as the friction      melts the butter and your pastry gets oily.
4. Using a knife, stir in just enough of the cold water to bind the dough together.
5. Wrap the dough in clingfilm and chill for 10-15 minutes before using.

Variants

• Use 50% animal lard to butter for a crisper pastry
• Use an egg yolk instead of water for a richer pastry – very crumbly but yummy
• Use and egg yolk and pinch of sugar – ideal for fruit tarts but crumbles even more
• Substitute other flours for part of the plain flour – chestnut flour is interesting nutty taste.
• Pick a liquid: I’ve had Guinness pastry around a steak and ale pie (good reason to open a bottle!)

Flaky pastry – this is easier if you start with double the original ingredients.

• Roll out the first original pastry to a shape roughly 3 x 1
• Flatten a block of butter to about 5mm thick and a just less than half of the area of the pastry.
• Place the butter block in the middle of the pastry sheet, fold the two sides over to slightly overlap in the middle the butter will be totally covered in the pastry
• Turn through ninety degrees (a quarter turn) and roll out to the original length
• Fold the two ends to the middle and then one side over the other
• Chill the block or 15 minutes or so
• Repeat the last rolling out, turning, folding and chilling steps two more times
• Eventually you will have a layer of butter between each of several hundred wafer thin layers (8 x 8 x 8 if you are interested in the numbers).
• When cooked the water in the butter vaporises and the steam lifts the layers – the French say mille-feuille (thousand leaves). I say tasty.