Puff pastry baked goods look very appetizing and beautiful - multi-layered structure and surface with many small bubbles. Puff pastry can be bland (no yeast added) and yeast.
Any type of puff pastry can be purchased at almost every grocery store today. Yeast differs from unleavened by the presence of yeast in the recipe, more lush forms when baked, fewer layers (20-100 layers) and some sourness in taste. Unleavened dough is more flaky (150-250 layers), tender and thin when baked. There is no sour taste in it. The process of cooking yeast-free is more complicated and time-consuming.
As a rule, puff yeast dough is used to prepare savory pastries - pies with meat, fish and vegetables, savory buns. Unleavened dough is more suitable for making muffins, sweet pies, cakes and pastries (eg Napoleon cake) and cheese rolls.
Unleavened puff pastry recipe
You will need: 1 egg, 1 tbsp. vodka, 3 tsp. vinegar 9%, ½ tsp. salt, 180 ml of boiled water, 3 glasses of premium flour, 200 g of butter.
Break an egg into a glass, add water, vinegar, vodka and salt there. Be sure to pour vodka after water, otherwise the egg will curl. Mix all ingredients well and pour into a container for kneading the dough.
Add ½ part flour after sifting 2-3 times. Gradually adding flour, replace the tough, elastic dough. It shouldn't stick to your hands.
After that, put the dough in a plastic bag or wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1-2 hours. Put a rolling pin there too. It is important. While the dough “ripens” in the cold, prepare the butter for use. Thaw it until soft.
After the allotted time, remove the dough from the refrigerator and roll it into a thin rectangular layer 5-6 mm in size. Spread oil on 2/3 of the layer in an even layer so that it does not reach the edges by 1 cm. Then cover the part with oil with the empty part of the layer. And cover the rolled part with the remaining 1/3 part of the butter dough open. You will end up with a long, three-layered rectangle. Roll it with a rolling pin several times along the length of the layer. Attention! From this moment, it is no longer possible to roll the dough across.
Then fold the dough into three more layers (now 9 layers) to make a square and refrigerate for 40 minutes. Don't forget to freeze the rolling pin as well. Then take out the dough again, roll it out and fold it again into three layers. As a result, you should have 27 layers.
Repeat the whole procedure 2 more times: roll out the dough, fold, cool until the number of layers reaches 243. This is normal layering for unleavened dough. The finished dough is best used immediately for baking. But you can store it in the freezer too.
Yeast Puff Pastry Recipe
To prepare the dough, you will need: 0.5 kg of flour, 350 g of butter (can be replaced with margarine), 1 glass of milk, 80 g of sugar, 1 tsp. salt, 11 g of pressed yeast.
Set aside 2-3 tablespoons. flour. You will need them later for sandwiching. Put the rest of the flour in a mixing bowl, add salt. Dissolve the sugar in ½ tbsp. milk and pour into flour. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.
Dissolve the yeast in another container with the remaining warm milk and also pour into the flour mixture. Stir and add ½ stick of softened butter. Knead hard dough. Wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it with a rolling pin for 4 hours, or leave it overnight. The dough should rise 2 times. After the required period has expired, remove the kolob from the refrigerator and roll it into a rectangular or square layer.
Further, all actions correspond to the recipe for puff unleavened dough with the difference that the number of layers in yeast dough should be less - from 20 to 100. That is, the number of rolling and folding should not exceed four.
The dough can be stored in the refrigerator for up to 3 days, and in the freezer for one month.
