PUFF PASTE you have a marble slab to work on when making puff paste, your work will be easier. A rolling-pin with movable handles makes the touch lighter. There can be no heavy handed methods, or you will have a solid, indigestible substance. Scald an earthen bowl, fill with ice water; wash your hands in hot water, then in cold. Work 1 pound butter in a bowl cold water until it is waxy and nearly all the salt is washed out of it. Take out the butter, pat and squeeze till the water flies. Measure from it 2 level tablespoonfuls, mold the rest into an oblong cake, then set it where it will grow hard and cold. Sift 1 pound flour with I teaspoonful salt into the bowl. Rub between the fin gers and thumb the 2 tablespoonfuls butter. Mix with ice water, stirring constantly till you have a soft dough. Turn out on a marble slab, which has been dusted with flour. Knead with an even, light touch, till it feels elas tic; then cover with a napkih, and set away to " ripen " five minutes. When the dough is ripened, you may begin work on it. Put the paste on the slab and, with the lightest possi ble pats from the rolling-pin, shape it about half as wide as it is long, keep ing the corners square. At one end lay the hardened piece of butter. Over this fold the rest of the dough. Tuck lightly around the edges, in closing all the air possible. With light taps from the rolling-pin break up the butter, spreading it and roll ing the paste into a longer strip. Be careful to keep the sides and ends of the paste even, and to break as few air bubbles as possible. When the
strip is almost as long as the slab, fold it like the letter Z, and begin again rolling, folding, and turning until the process has been repeated six times. If the paste shows the least symptom of being soft, or the butter of breaking through, set it away to chill before you finish the process. Roll always in one direction, from you, with a long, sweeping motion. By cutting the paste across after the work is completed, you may see the texture which gives you a crust eight times as high after baking as before it was set in an oven. You will no tice layer after layer of a waferlike thickness of butter and paste with tiny bubbles between. Wrap it in parch ment paper and set away in a covered dish overnight. It will be all the more tender and flaky for twenty-four hours of " ripening." During the winter a batch of puff paste, wrapped and covered, may be kept for several weeks in a very cold place. Use it as desired, baking pates, vol au vents, or tarts as required. These will keep five or six days after making, being reheated before they are filled.
The oven for baking puff paste should be as hot as for rolls, with the greatest heat underneath, so the pat4 can rise to its full height before browning. As heat touches the pas try the bubbles expand, lifting the thin layers higher and higher. When it has reached its height, and is baked delicately brown, you have what is properly called puff paste.