Pastry
Rough puff, full puff and blitz pastry: what you trade for the time
All three make layers. They differ in how the butter is distributed at the start, and that decides how even the lift is and how…
Pastry
Laminating, shortcrust, choux and keeping butter where it belongs.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Pastry
Lamination lives in a temperature window about three degrees wide
Butter has to be firm enough to stay in a sheet and soft enough to stretch with the dough. Outside roughly 15 to 18C, one of those two fails.
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Pastry
Shortcrust is rubbed in, not creamed, and that is the whole point
Coating flour particles in fat before the water arrives is what keeps pastry short. Cream the butter instead and you get a biscuit…
Pastry
Blind baking is structural, and the beans are doing real work
An unweighted pastry case slumps down the sides and puffs up in the base. The weight is holding the shape while the starch sets and…
Pastry
Choux is cooked twice and the first cook is the one people rush
Drying the paste on the hob before the eggs go in decides how much egg it can absorb, and that decides how high the buns rise.
Pastry
Croissant butter sits near 25 per cent of the dough, and there is a reason
Too little and the layers merge into bread. Too much and the butter cannot be contained during rolling, so it leaks and the…
Pastry
Resting pastry is hydration and relaxation, not a superstition
Two separate things happen during a rest, and knowing which one you need tells you whether thirty minutes is enough or three hours…
Pastry
Hot water crust does the opposite of everything shortcrust wants
Boiling water, melted fat and warm handling would ruin a tart case. Here they produce a pastry strong enough to stand up on its own…
Pastry
Filo gets its layers from stretching, and strudel from the same trick
There is no butter folded into filo. The thinness comes from a very extensible dough pulled by hand until you can read through it.
Pastry
A soggy bottom is a heat transfer problem before it is a filling problem
The base of a tart is the hardest part to cook, because the filling sits on it absorbing heat and the tin insulates it from below.
Pastry
Six turns gives 729 layers, and the seventh makes things worse
Layer counts in laminated pastry are simple arithmetic with a hard ceiling. Past a certain thinness the sheets merge and the lift…
Pastry
Docking, venting and giving the steam somewhere to go
Pastry rises because water turns to steam. Deciding where that steam escapes, and whether it escapes at all, is a choice you make…