Epic Gluten Free Rough Puff Pastry

Recipe

This is the gluten free puff pastry you've been looking for your whole life. Crisp, golden layers with actual puff, my gluten free rough puff pastry is everything you've ever wanted in your pastry. Use it for pies, pastries, whatever your heart desires!

Ahh gluten free puff pastry... It once seemed like a pipe dream, something that could never happen in the way I wanted it to. For a long time I thought I could maybe manage pastry that had flakes aplenty but not an actual, genuine, LOOK AT THOSE LAYERS kind of puff. Even with wheat flour I never really got the result I wanted. Enter my Epic Rough Puff Pastry...

Oh yes, you're looking at vol-au-vents. Gluten free vol-au-vents. With actual layers. That's what this rough puff pastry can do! (Hence the word "epic" in the recipe title). I can honestly say that this is the best pastry I've ever made, gluten free or otherwise. I always thought I'd need a rough puff and a full puff recipe in my life, but I feel that all my puffy pastry dreams have been fulfilled in this one recipe.

The process for making my Epic Rough Puff Pastry is actually very approachable - you won't find any butter blocks here. We only need to take care of three things to achieve the perfect puff:

1. We need to use big chunks of butter. Like, at LEAST 2cm cubes. The dough will look ridiculous at first, but once we're finished with it it'll be silky smooth like a dream.

2. We're going to make the dough a little bit wetter than a normal pastry dough would be. The extra moisture makes the dough come together easily without having to melt the butter into it.

3. We need to keep the dough cool while we're working with it. That means refrigerating the dough for a good hour after bringing it together, and then refrigerating it again for short periods throughout the rest of the process.

As long as those three aspects are taken care of the method is very simple. We're going to use a process called lamination to give the pastry maximum puff. Lamination simply refers to folding the dough multiple times to create thin layers of butter in the dough, which will then turn to steam in the oven when the pastry is cooked - resulting in that puff and flakiness we all crave.

To laminate this pastry we first need to roll it out into a long rectangle with the short side facing us. Then we'll fold it just like a letter - top third of the pastry folded down, then the bottom third folded up on top of the top third. This pastry generally needs four rounds of folding with 15 minutes of refrigeration in between, but you can do up to six folds if your pastry still seems a bit sticky and buttery. Here's a look at how the pastry changes throughout the lamination process:

As you can see it starts out with big chunks of butter visible in the dough, and it gradually gets smoother with each fold until you can no longer see the butter - but it's still there, contained within thin sheets ready to PUFF.

This recipe makes enough for one 23cm pie with top and bottom crusts, or roughly the equivalent of two large store bought sheets of pastry. It's easy to halve or double, but if you're doing a big batch it's best to divide it into halves for the lamination process to make life easier.

Use this pastry like you would any puff pastry. To bake it you may find you need a slightly higher temperature than normal to get it nice and golden brown. Go forth and enjoy your pastry goodies!