Recipe from Baking By Hand by Andy King and Jackie King (Page Street Publishing; August 2013) Printed with permission. Available through Amazon.com Making real puff pastry is a beautiful thing, with all of those flaky layers, brittle and shattering. It's also a huge time commitment, so we like to use this adaptation of dough that we first came across in one of our much-loved King Arthur baking books. This dough is flaky and extremely rich and tender due to the high percentage of butter and sour cream. Its acidity helps tenderize the dough and the fat adds more richness. Lastly, the baking powder helps to give the layers their needed puff in this short cut version of this pastry classic. We have created many bakery favorites using this versatile recipe.
Place the flour, baking powder and salt into a container that will easily fit in your freezer. Chill the mixture for 30 minutes or overnight. You can't chill it for too long.
In the meantime, cube your butter into about 1/2-inch/1-cm cubes. Keep chilled in the refrigerator.
Once the flour has chilled sufficiently, put it in a bowl and add the chilled butter. Rub the butter through the flour to break it up and incorporate it.
Keep at it until the butter is broken down but you still see chunks of butter. The chunks should be a little larger than large peas.
You want the butter to stay in large chunks in order to create a flaky crust.
Add the sour cream to the dry ingredients and mix by hand. Form a shaggy mass of dough just untill all of the moisture is absorbed and there are no dry spots. You do not want to overwork it so much that you break down the butter completely.
Turn the dough out onto a floured counter and form into a rough rectangle. Roll the dough out until it becomes a larger 6-inch x 16-inch/15 x 40-cm rectangle.
Sprinkle the surface of the dough with flour, grab the left hand side of the rectangle and place one-third of the surface into the middle. Then, do the same with the right side, completely overlapping the left side with this "envelope folkd."
Rotate the dough 90 derees.
Roll out to another 6-inch x 16-inch/15 x 40-cm rectangle, then lightly flour and fold the dough again as before.
Take this packet of dough, place it on a sheet pan and wrap in plastic wrap.
Chill the dough for 1 hour to relax before using, or wrap tightly with plastic wrap and freeze.