This post is brought to you in part by the letter Y.
OK so, here's the thing I think I should come clean about: I didn't use the same recipe as everyone else for the DB challenge this time *ducks from the rotten eggs and tomatoes flying her way*. My sincerest apologies to Steph of a whisk and a spoon who is our hostess this month, I am sincerely grateful to you for getting me to finally make puff pastry, and I promise the next batch will be the recipe you chose.
See, I'm kind of obsessed with Michel Roux's book Pastry: Savory & Sweet right now and since I'd never made puff pastry before and have been trying as many recipes as I can -none of which have failed me so far- from his book, I figured if I was going to give puff pastry a go, which in my house means sprinting from the living areas upstairs to my kitchen dungeon when Baby Saffron deigns to grace me with a nap, I wasn't going to suddenly have a brief, puffy fling with Michel Richard when Michel Roux and I had been having a torrid pastry love affair for the last couple of months.
So, I opened Pastry: Savory & Sweet to page 108, circled the table we don't own in this pre-furnished house a number of times before gathering my courage to clear and clean it thoroughly since it happens to be marble (and marble is the ideal surface on which to roll pastry I am repeatedly told) and set about making the detrempe (first dough that will eventually hold the slab of butter) and that was the first thing that didn't go so well, 'cause you know, Michel Roux does it perfectly in the pictures in the book because he's been doing it for oh, I don't know, around 55-60 years now, and this was my first attempt. Let's just say that mixing the way he describes by hand, not so great at it; then I'm pretty sure I overworked the dough to get it to be homogeneous before letting it rest in the fridge, and that is when I called upon Y's expertise. Thus began the saga of the if-left-in-the-fridge-too-long-it-could-become-a-bit-grey dough and off I went, intending to leave it in there until the next day instead of for 2 hours.
Well, needless to say that whole timing thing didn't work according to schedule, because that was a Saturday and Y asked me how they'd come out on Tuesday morning to which I replied that I hadn't gotten around to making the turns yet. As Y had predicted, by the time I actually got around to doing my turns on the following Thursday, it had become a bit gray on the side in the wrapping closest to the oxygen supply. Thankfully, she also let me know that it didn't matter if it was still grey, "it's still good" she said, repeating it to me like a mantra.
Once the turns began, oh the travesty. Michel Roux tells you to make a rectangle that is 16 by 28 inches, which is quite large and possibly in the realm of ludicrous for a complete beginner like me, but try to make a 16 by 28 inch rectangle I did, taking up the whole length of the marble table as I went. I'd be lying if I said I thought my butter was at the perfect consistency because soon after lovingly wrapping the butter in the detrempe and rolling it out for my first turn, ever so tiny tears began to appear in the dough and tiny pieces of soft butter started spilling out of the edges, but I plowed on, determined to see if it could work anyway. I made the huge rectangle, folded it, quarter turned it and rolled it out again, fine tears be damned, oozing (but not liquid) butter be damned. I folded it and threw it back in the fridge figuring that, if nothing else, we could eat some delicious buttery hockey pucks in the end.
I'd consult periodically with Y on twitter, and while waiting for the clock to strike time for another turn, I spoke to some favorite people on twitter amongst which @ColloquialCook who is one of the funniest bilingual people I have ever met. She cheered me on, declaring that as far as she knew, a little spillage and tearing had never entirely killed a puff pastry dough. So on it went, the grey disappearing completely back into a charmed buttery color on the third turn, and by the fourth turn the dough appeared to be behaving itself rather decently. By then I'd given up on making my rectangles 16 by 28 inches and just rolled them out as much as I could before folding them. The cutting and shaping were fairly uneventful, as it were, but the next step in this laugh-a-minute process to go awry was the actual baking.
I attributed what happened to 3/4 of my small and large vol-au-vents (which you are about to see) to be the cause of my masterfully uneven rolling and layering, but it turns out that may not have been the whole story. To sum up: They rose sideways, which I later found out may have been partially caused by my fan-ventilated oven and my not turning them halfway.
So here I present to you, as christened by my father when I described their somewhat familiar horn of plenty shape, Corne-au-Vent or horn-with-the-wind instead of flight-with-the-wind.
The filling in these pictures is caramelized apple sauce topped with muscat grapes, because I like my food sweet and extremely tart thank you. We also had a beef and ale filling in large vol-au-vents for dinner but it was too late and I was too lazy to take pictures of those too.
The September 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.
