In the Year of Fearless Baking: Episode #9: Puff Pastry

When I was growing up, it seemed that at least 80% of recipes used in my house came from a worn out, splattered copy of The Joy of Cooking. It was the go-to resource for everything related to cooking, and to this day I insist that it has the finest recipe format of any cookbook ever.

While this post is not about The Joy of Cooking, I want to take a minute to give credit to what I consider my equivalent go-to resource: Smitten Kitchen. Deb Perelman, the illustrious author of the amazing blog, writes with a hilarious but informative style, and demystifies all sorts of cooking techniques that could otherwise be intimidating. Basically, before I cook anything, I check to see if there is a recipe for it on Smitten Kitchen first. Why waste my time with other recipes when I know that Deb will have identified the best one out there (and probably adjusted it so that it will taste even better)?

But I digress. I couldn’t decide what to take on this weekend, but I was leafing through her cookbook and landed on something that looked too amazing to pass up. Four words, guys: butterscotch banana tarte tatin. The fact that we were having guests for dinner seemed like an excellent excuse to make such an extravagant dessert, and the fact that it involves puff pastry seemed like a sign that I should continue down the path of laminated dough for another week.

To make the puff, I used this excellent recipe. Puff pastry is very similar to croissant dough, except it is unyeasted. In fact, the dough that makes up the layers between all the butter is literally just flour, water and salt; a good rise depends solely on the water in the layers of dough becoming steam in the oven and pushing up on the butter.

And rise it did! I swear it’s some strange magic. This is what it looked like when it came out of the oven, but unfortunately I failed to take any other pictures of the tart. I was having so much fun drinking wine and talking, and really, who abandons their guests to go take lots of pictures of the dessert they’re about to serve? But for the record: the pastry collapsed a bit as it cooled (which is what is supposed to happen), and then it got inverted onto a plate so the bananas were on top. Totally out of control. Deb, I can’t even tell you how sexy your recipe is.

This morning, nursing a slight hangover, I utilized the leftover puff pastry to make palmiers, which was the right thing to do. And here I will reiterate the strangely magical quality of this stuff. Because really, you just roll out the pastry, sprinkle it with sugar, fold it up and slice it. Then you put it in the oven and this happens:

What?! Holy wow. Butter, you’ve done it again.