Basic rough pastry dough

It is always useful to have handy some kind of basic pastry dough if you bake often. Vice-versa when you have something like this handy you'd bake often :-)

I normally struggle to find ready made pastry dough in Mumbai except for the online stuff.

I decided to mock the puff pastry to the best of my ability.

Ingredients

2 cups of All purpose flour (apprx 150 gms)

30 gms of butter (very cold) + 15 gm

4-5 tbsp cold water(ice chilled)

Pinch of salt (Omit if you are using salted butter)

Method

1)      Chop or grate the butter (it should be very cold) in a bowl. Sift in the flour with the salt on top of the butter.

2)      Using a fork or pastry cutter mix the flour or butter to form sticky dough. Use water as required.

3)      The texture of the dough will be rough, which is fine. If the dough is very sticky to work with then pop it in fridge for 10 min and then proceed

4)      Using lot of free flour, roll the dough length wise. Try keeping the shape rectangular.

5)      Fold the dough from both sides towards the centre (see picture below).  Rotate to 90 degrees and roll out again. Refold and repeat couple of more times. Use the additional 15 gm of butter to rub when folding. You should not melt the butter just apply with a pallete knife as if you are buttering bread.

6)      If at point in step 5 you feel that the butter is melting then pop it in fridge and start again after 10 minutes.

7)      Your rough puff pastry is ready to use.

Use it for any kinf od pie, tart, or stuffed bakery. This will last for a month if frozen and for a week when refrigerated (Store in cling film to avoid discoloring)