Chocolate puff pastry

Last weekend I had one of those moments which I’m sure (or at least I hope) every baker experiences now and again. I’d bought the ingredients and set about making a batch of chocolate puff pastry, but almost from the outset it seemed to go horribly wrong. The butter started to break up, creating a strange marbled pattern in the dough and after the first turn the butter started peeking through the pastry and sticking to everything; worktop, rolling pin and hands.

But as I’ve already mentioned, I hate food waste and this recipe uses an enormous amount of butter, so I wasn’t going to give up that easily. I carried on rolling and folding until I had completed 8 turns. It still looked a bit of a mess at this point, and I was worried that the lamination in the dough must have completely disappeared, what with the butter seeming to have developed a mind of it’s own.

I was pleasantly surprised when, on cutting the dough in half, there were nice clear layers through it, and I realised that I probably didn’t need to panic after all.



Part of the problem could have been that I hadn’t been able to find any pictures online of chocolate puff pastry when it’s half way through being made, and probably for good reasons: it looks like something off ‘Embarrassing Bodies’! I decided I would include the pictures of my puff pastry mess in this post, however embarrassing, so that you don’t have to go through the same pastry-induced anxiety!

The other part of the problem is possibly that I added more water to the dough than the recipe suggested, making it too soft. The butter and dough need to be at similar consistencies for them to roll out nicely, so next time I will stick to the recipe and keep the dough quite dry.

I was also concerned that the cooked puff pastry would be just like normal puff pastry but brown, and therefore not worth all the extra faffing, but it has a distinctive cocoa taste as well as all the lightness of the regular kind, so I’m looking forward to using it in some interesting new recipes.

Things I have learnt from making chocolate puff pastry:

You will need more flour on the worktop when rolling out the dough than with normal puff pastry, but you should still brush off any excess flour before you fold it up.

Use a letter fold (folding it into 3 at each turn) rather than the book fold used in my regular puff pastry recipe. This dough is much more fragile, and the letter fold will be less likely to cause it the break up more than necessary.

The recipe I used said that you should put the dough in the fridge for at least an hour between each turn. I did this for the first 2 turns, then when it started to look like it was going wrong I switched to my usual 30 minutes between every 2 turns. If you have the time/patience you can do it the slow way, but I do not.

Don’t lick the spoon after mixing together the butter and cocoa: it tastes unbelievably disgusting!

 

Chocolate puff pastry: makes around 1kg of pastry
(adapted from the recipe at Canelle et Vanille)

420g plain flour
70g salted butter, melted and cooled
185ml cold water
½ teaspoon salt
410g salted butter, softened
50g cocoa, sifted

Stage 1:

• Put the flour and salt in a large mixing bowl and make a well in the centre
• Add the melted butter followed by the water and mix with your hands until it comes together
• Knead the mixture briefly to form a smoothish dough
• Wrap the dough in cling film and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes
• Beat together the softened butter and cocoa until thoroughly combined
• Form this mixture into a flat square, wrap in cling film and set aside

Stage 2:

• Roll the dough out into a rectangle twice the size of your square of butter
• Put the butter on top of the pastry towards one end and fold the other half of the pastry over the top to cover the butter completely

• Bash the dough with the rolling pin a number of times to ensure the butter is evenly distributed throughout the pastry, then roll out the dough to form a long rectangle

• Fold the dough into thirds like a letter

• Turn the dough by 90° and repeat this folding and rolling process once more

(Eek! this is where it started looking scary)

• You have now completed two turns of the dough
• Wrap the dough in cling film and return to the fridge to rest for 30 minutes

Stage 3:

• Roll out and fold the dough for another two turns, as described above
• put the dough back in the fridge for a further 30 minutes

(After 4 turns there is butter poking out all over the place and it stuck to everything)

Stage 4:

• Repeat with two more turns of the dough
• Put it back into the fridge for 30 minutes

(Looking weirdly like some kind of sheep innards at this point)

Stage 5:

• Make another two turns, so that you have completed 8 in total
• Roll out the dough to the required shape and place on a baking tray
• Alternatively you can chop it into smaller portions and put the well-wrapped dough in the freezer until required