Shammi's Curried Onion Egg Puffs

Well, I have been wanting some of these guys since I saw their picture on Shammi's blog. They are simple, they are yummy, and they are a snack or a starter or your supper. Savory, and rather smart, they are also somehow a satisfying nursery food kind of treat.

I followed her excellent recipe (including also just a very small amount of shredded lime leaf from my little tree on the porch) baked them up, and have been dipping them in cilantro chutney and (yes really) tomato ketchup. A keeper. For some reason, I particularly like them with a cup of hot tea. YUM. Thank you, Shammi.

I am afraid that I may have to learn to make puff pastry. The grocery store freezer stuff is less nice than the other, simpler ingredients in this dish. Recently, I saw that all-butter, ready made puff pastry costs some forty dollars a pound(!) at Williams-Sonoma. The market for this item does not include yrs. truly. I'm mulling this over, not being much of a pastry hand. Does anyone experienced in this brand of magic have advice for the puff pastry novice? If I do this, which recipe should I try?

Comments

[anapestic]

Puff pastry is really not as difficult as people want you to think it is. There is some disagreement about methods, but Julia Child and I both think that the rapide method produces results as good as the much fussier classique method. The advantage of rapide is that you don't have to fuss with encasing the butter in the dough because you mix it all up to start with. That also means that you can do more turns between refrigerations, but if you haven't made it before, you'll want to refrigerate frequently more to rest your nerves than to rest your dough.

The ingredients that Julia used were 3 cups all-purpose flour, 1 cup cake flour, 6.5 sticks of butter, 1 cup ice water. If you're using unsalted butter, you'll probably want to add some salt, as well. The butter has to be very cold, and it should be cut into pieces no smaller than tablespoons. You put the flour and the butter in the bowl of your Kitchenaid, and you mix with the paddle attachment briefly so that the butter gets coated with the flour but doesn't get cut up too small. Then, with the mixer going, you pour in the ice water, and when it clumps into a ball, you turn it off. Then you put it on your pastry marble with enough flour to keep it from sticking and turn, turn, turn. I really should do a blog post on it sometime. It's a lot of fun to make.

[Kimberly]

I've never made puff pastry, but when I have on occasion considered doing so, I've thought that I should really ask Bakerina, because a bakerina - as if there could be more than one! - knows these things. She may even have written a post on it.