[Sca-cooks] recipe from the Libro Novo

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach nickiandme at att.net:
>Then take four pounds of white flour, and six egg yolks, and rose water, three
>ounces of butter, and make your pastry dough, and make the pastry 
>sheet somewhat
>big.  Then you shall load with butter that is a little hard, and you 
>shall wrap
>another turn and you shall load in the same manner with butter, and 
>you shall do
>this for three or four turns, enough till that you shall have distributed a
>pound of butter, and you shall make your pastry.

<snip>

>Pastry:
>2 cups flour,
>2 eggs,
>2 tablespoons rosewater
>1 pat of melted butter
>1/2 cup cold water
>
>I mixed these ingredients together.  Then floured my rolling surface 
>generously
>with flour.  I rolled out half the dough into a large rectangular 
>shape.  It was
>still a fairly thick dough - less than a quarter inch - more than an 
>eighth thick.  Then I took a stick of butter and shaved the butter 
>off of it unto one side (half) the rolled out dough.  I folded it 
>over, and then folded the ends in again.  So that there were three 
>folds.  Then I rolled it out again.  And added the shaved butter 
>into the center half of the dough. Folded the sides over until they 
>met in the middle and then folded the whole thing over once more. 
>And repeated this once more. 
>
>Then, I rolled it out once last time and cut it into three roughly equal
>rectangles.  I place one of the pieces of dough on my baking stone 
>and as evenly
>as possible I spread half of the cheese mixture over the dough.  I placed the
>next layer of dough on top and spread the last of the cheese mixture onto in.
>And I topped this layer with the last piece of dough.
>
>I trimmed up the sides to make it more even looking.
>
>Then I baked it in a 350 degree oven for about half an hour.  The top didn't
>look browned as it came out.  I may need to think about added a butter coating
>on it as it bakes.
>
>It tasted alright warm.  A bit bland.  The dough was very flaky. You 
>could see the layers and even peel some of them off. Not really what 
>I thought it would be for
>puffed though. I was thinking croissant layers - but maybe my 
>expectations are just a tad to high?  I didn't do the modern method 
>of refrigerating the dough and the butter until both were hard - 
>because the recipe didn't call for it.  Although in reading my Joy 
>of Cooking on puff pastries - they explain to use the same method of 
>folding and turning as I ended up using to make the pastry.

It's possible your expectations of this as puff pastry were too high. 
Modern puff paste recipes generally call for anywhere from half as 
much to equal parts butter to flour, usually equal parts. This recipe 
calls for one-quarter as much butter as flour, or half of what we'd 
think of as the low end of the scale for modern puff pastry, although 
it looks like what you actually used was more like half as much 
butter as flour: a quarter pound of butter to half a pound of flour 
(approximately)?  Modern puff pastry is also usually baked at a 
higher temperature than 350 degrees F, at least at the start, to 
achieve the benefits of "oven spring", in which the butter melts (or 
other moisture is present) to provide simultaneous lubrication 
between layers and a quick shot of steam inside the pastry structure. 
Another consideration is that you say you didn't give it the chilled 
rest periods most puff paste recipes call for: this may be assumed, 
since I suspect the recipe is written for cooks with at least a basic 
knowledge of pastry-work, and experience quickly shows when a pastry 
is getting overworked, and what one should do about it. When you work 
with something frequently, you become more sensitive to the signs.

So you assembled this like a napoleon, but before baking? That might 
be another reason it may have behaved in an unexpected manner.

I'm a little surprised to hear that it was bland, though. Maybe, as 
you suggest, you need a different combination of cheeses...

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
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