Lift your reputation with Carême Puff Pastry

Chefs all around the world know the struggles of making the perfect puff pastry from scratch. Flaky texture and impressive lift are always sought after but rarely achieved. Pies and other pastry dishes are served with unimpressive, flat lids due to poorly made pastry. Fundamentally, the recipe for pastry sounds easy to perfect as it is essentially two parts water to one part fat, however this is far from the truth. Making puff pastry with impressive lift and exquisite taste is both an art and science.

Carême Pastry have perfected this science over the past decade to bring you a perfect puff pastry that showcases remarkable lift. In fact, the all butter puff pastry records 7cm of lift from just a single sheet. See the video below to see just how much rise is possible from one sheet of Carême pastry.

Puff Rising from Caremepastry on Vimeo.

How do we do this?

The secret is in the production process and nailing the recipe. Pastry dough must be kept between 8C and 11C to prevent the butter from becoming too soft. To combat this, Carême work in small, 10kg batches of dough to ensure that the temperature is kept within this range.

Another important process Carême undertake is the resting of dough between turns. This enables the gluten strands within the pastry to link up and retain the layering of the dough. In fact, creating Carême pastry is a two-day process. The base dough, known as the detrempe, is prepared on day one and then rested overnight. The following day the laminating will then begin. The butter is then hand folded into the dough, which is followed by the first set of turns.

In total, the dough is turned four times, which creates 81 layers of butter and 82 layers of dough – for a combined 163 layers of dough and butter in the one sheet of Puff Pastry. The 7cm of lift is possible due to the large number of layers expanding from steam generation in a hot oven. This is also why Carême recommend starting baking at 200C (fan forced) and then to reduce the temperature once the dough has lifted.

The Carême production process enables chefs and cooks across Australia to easily create great looking dishes that taste as good as they look. Using high quality pastry will enable a restaurant to command a premium price for the dish as diners will be delighted by the melt in your mouth texture. Carême create the pastry so you have time to make the dish.