Friday, July 31, 2009

Puff pastry recipe (quick version)

There are two main ways to make puff pastry - slow (right one) and quick one. Today I' ll give a recipe of a about quick one, because I have tried it recently and was satisfied by result.

Using it I made puff bows with sugar and cinnamon



To make this pastry (recipe)

You need

200g of butter or margarine
2 cups of flour
1/2 tea spoon of salt
1 tea spoon of sugar

How to make

Chop butter and flour together with a knife.


P.S. Do not make pastry even! Leave little butter pieces.

Add other ingredients, mix everything, put more flour if necessary. Cover the pastry and put in refrigerator for several hours (at least 1).

Then roll the pasty out and put together in layers. Do this operation 3-4 times and your quick puff pastry is ready!

Delicious things I' ve made using yeast dough

As I already said, when I conquered yeast dough, I started using it like crazy.

Here are some of my delicacies

Vatrushki (with cheese curd)


Rolls with sugar




Rolls with poppy-seeds

And so on...


Yeast dough (the best recipe ever)

This recipe is pure treasure. I have tried to make this dough for many years using internet and books, but the best result I got when used my mother's recipe. All this time it was so close! Now I make rolls and pasties all the time, plus - it is really cheap! (you get lots of it)

You need

2 eggs
500 ml of milk
50 g of yeast (not dry)
3 tea spoons of sugar (if you want to make sweet dough, add 250 g of sugar later)
50g of butter or margarine
about 1 kg of flour

How to make

Warm up milk to about 40C (1/2 cup), mix it with yeast and 3 spoons of sugar.




It will look like this





















After 5-10 minutes size of mixture will double























Warm up the rest of milk, put the mixture in cup in it, add 2 eggs, 50g of butter, more sugar if you make sweet dough and about 800g of flour. (dough has to be almost ready, but if it is not, never mind, it would be better sticky than put too much flour in it ).


































Cover the dough and let it rest for about 1,5 hour. During this time it will rise several times. Each time you need to press on it to make it's size smaller.
When time has passed, add some flour (about 200g) in order to get ready dough, which looks like this



Unleavened dough recipe

Unleavened dough is probably the simplest. It is used for flat cakes, dumplings (for example pelmeni) and so on.

To make unleavened dough
(recipe)

You need

2/3 cup of water
1/2 tea spoon of salt
3 cups of flour
2 big spoons of oil
1 egg


How to make

Mix all ingredients together and let it "rest" for 30-40 minutes.
I make this dough recipe mainly for pelmeni


The most important thing!



Can you imagine cosy home without a smell of home-made baking? I don't. And what is the most important thing you need to know to become a great baker? Right, it's a dough and pastry making !

So, first of all, dough and pastry types.

Unleavened dough
Yeast dough
Puff pastry
Choux pastry
Shortcrust pastry

Of course, there are more (including, for example, a pastry for a sponge cake which is used for many wonderful things - i couldn't find the it's name (help wanted!)), but for a start I'll share recipes of these, the most important ones. This recipes of pastry are proved and trustworthy so I hope that they will brings lots of joy for you and your close ones as they did for mine!