It's All in the Four-Fold for Puff Pastry

On Saturday, my baking partner, Amanda, and I made a puff pastry dough. It's a bit labor intensive, so I'll break down the steps.

1) First you make the dough. You do this by combining bread flour and cake flour with butter and salt that has been dissolved in cold water. For mixing, we used the small KitchenAid mixer that you probably have at home. After developing a nice, smooth dough -- without overmixing, as that develops too much gluten -- we plopped the dough onto a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and shaped it into a rectangle with our hands. We then covered it with plastic wrap and let it chill out in the cooler for about 20 minutes.  

2) As it chilled (to relax the gluten) we prepared the butter. We blended it in the mixer with a bit more of the combined flours, to both soften the butter and absorb excess moisture. We shaped it into a rectangle and slipped it into the cooler just until we'd rolled out our dough. Then we flipped the butter over onto the dough, as shown.

At this point, it would be hard for an onlooker to tell if we were making Danish pastry or puff pastry, since both include a butter roll-in -- unless he or she had a good nose. Danish pastry is made with yeast, puff pastry is not. And Danish layers are made with three-folds, while puff pastry layers are created with four-folds.

Imagine it this way: for a three-fold, a rectangular-shaped dough is visually divided into thirds, by two imaginary dotted lines. The top edge of the dough is folded down at the line marking the top third. Then the bottom edge is folded up at the other marker, overlapping the first fold. So the number of layers in the dough triple with each three-fold.

For a four-fold, imagine that you have three dotted lines running the width of your dough. You fold the top edge down as for the three-fold, so that the edge meets the middle dotted line, or middle of the dough. The bottom edge is then folded up so that its edge meets the middle line as well. Then you fold the top half over onto the bottom half. The butter and dough layers are quadrupled with each four-fold.

3) So, after "locking-in" the butter with the four-fold, here's how our dough shaped up.

4) After letting the dough chill out for 30 minutes in the cooler, we then rolled it out, and gave the dough another four-fold. We repeated this step two more times, letting the dough chill for 30 minutes between each roll. After a final 30 minute chill, the dough was ready for use. Here's a photo of Amanda rolling out the dough.

* Just a note about flours, since I mentioned that we used cake and bread flour. Bread flour provides good quality gluten, while cake flour is a weak, low-gluten flour made from soft wheat. Cake flour is used primarily for cakes and delicate baked goods, while bread flour is usually used to make yeast breads. High-gluten flour is typically used for hard-crusted breads and in specialty products like pizza dough and bagels.