Making Palmiers with Quick Puff Pastry

Before Hawaii: a story and a recipe from The Baking Wizard!

Puff pastry can be turned into all sorts of sweet or savory creations. Here I show you how to make Palmiers, crisp multi-layered French pastries resembling palm leaves.

Here’s the easiest way to make puff pastry I know. It goes against all belief systems about building layers of air between sheets of buttery dough to produce a crisp and flaky result. Classic puff pastry requires multiple rolling and folding of the dough. This puff pastry requires no complicated shenanigans. You cut a lot of cold butter into flour, add sour cream, stir to make a dough, and that’s it! No complicated multi-rolling scheme. The reason this system works is because of the high fat content. Flakes of butter--lots of it--get encased in a gluten network and, as the pastry bakes and the butter melts, air spaces expand to lift and separate the sheets of dough into crispy layers. In Maida Heatter’s first cookbook (now revised), she calls this “Counterfeit Puff Paste” because it is so ridiculously easy. I could not believe that it would work, but it's astonishing how the pastry puffs and crisps after just one rolling.

History of Puff Pastry

Many cultures produced a puff pastry, including phyllo from the Middle East and the earliest known published recipe from Spain. "The first known recipe of modern puff pastry (using butter or lard), appears in the Spanish recipe book Libro del arte de cozina (Book on the art of cooking) written by Domingo Hernández de Maceras and published in 1607" ~ Wikipedia Puff pastry can be turned into all sorts of sweet or savory creations. Here I show you how to make Palmiers, crisp multi-layered French pastries resembling palm leaves. Be sure to use the best quality butter you can buy.