https://www.seriouseats.com/old-fashioned-flaky-pie-dough-recipe
The product here is fantastic, but I found it annoyingly difficult to find all the butter cubes to squish. This is my overthought process improvement. Also, I double the recipe because I’d rather have too much dough than be a little short.
As you’ll see if you read the recipe, the layers are formed by chopping the butter into 1/4-1/2” cubes, combining with the flour, and manually flattening the flour-coated cubes. I got annoyed that as more cubes were flattened, finding an unflattened cube became harder as the fraction of squished cubes gets smaller and smaller. In my dumb method of just combining everything in a big bowl, there was an unproductive search period at the end where lots of time was spent to find the last few cubes. Here’s my solution to this problem:
Grab a stick of butter and throw the other three sticks from a pound into the freezer. Measure 112g of all purpose flour and put it in a large, flat Tupperware. Chop the butter into 1/4” cubes and combine it with the flour. Mix them and put the cubes at the near end of the Tupperware. As you squish the butter cubes, drop them in the far end (or the big mixing bowl).. Once you’ve squished all of the cubes, dump the squished butter and flour into the mixing bowl. Repeat with the next stick of butter and another 112g of flour in the Tupperware. Do this for all four sticks of butter and continue with the recipe, measuring 114g of flour the last round of butter and flour if you’re anal.
by HornetsnHomebrew
1 Comment
the easy way is to dump it out onto a board or the table and just mash it with the heel of your hand. Push it into a pile with a bench knife, and do it again.
Warning, this makes something almost like ruff puff pastry so it tends to puff up when you blind bake it. Caught me sort of by surprise. You need to dock the crap out of it or something.