Published March 1, 1994.
Using a food processor and a new "jelly-roll" folding method, home cooks can now make puff pastry easily and quickly.
Making classic puff pastry requires planning, time, and lots of work. You must first make a dough, then soften butter, combine it with flour, and form the butter into a square. Next you wrap the dough around the butter and roll and fold (or "turn") the dough four to six times. Traditional "quick" puff pastry combines the dough and the butter and reduces the number of times the dough must be "turned." The butter is mixed with the flour to make a very rich dough containing many irregular layers of butter--a somewhat less arduous process. Nevertheless, it takes a great deal of will and effort.
We wondered if you could eliminate the repeated rolling and folding by handling the dough only once for really quick puff pastry while at the same time creating multiple layers in the dough.
We eventually found a method that accomplished our goal by folding the dough and rolling it up jelly-roll style. Mixing the dough in food processor also helped to speed things up. The dough puffed as well as any quick puff pastry we've ever made. Not only that, it definitely lived up to our hopes for saving time; the whole process--from measuring the flour to wrapping the dough and refrigerating--took only 15 minutes.
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