5.11.2011

I Heart Puff Pastry




If they made an I Love t-shirt that said puff pastry, you know, instead of New York, I would totally wear it!  Seriously, it's so flaky and light, it fools you into thinking you might actually be eating something good for you. Although Wikipedia is not always the most reliable source, their description of puff pastry seemed pretty spot on to me. 
In baking,a puff pastry is a light, flaky, unleavened pastry containing several layers of fat which is in solid state at 20 °C (68 °F). In raw form, puff pastry is a dough which is spread with solid fat and repeatedly folded and rolled out and used to produce the aforementioned pastries. The gaps that form between the layers is a result of the puff pastry rising as the water evaporates into steam during the baking process. 
So it has some fat in it. I guess it's not good for you after all, but the fat is the reason it tastes so good! However, that is not my favorite thing about puff pastry. My favorite thing is its versatility! It can be sweet or savory, used as a wrapper, a topper, a shell, a cookie, sprinkled with sugar or covered in cheese, or in the case of this post filled with love. You remember that love I was talking about in last weeks What's Cookin' Wednesday? Well this week the love is in my puff pastry, so really it's like double the love!


I found this simple and easy recipe for Asparagus and Mushroom Tarts on www.epicurious.com, which by the way if you have an iPad they have an excellent app I highly recommend you download. Best of all it's FREE! I digress, back to the love. The filling is a yummy mixture of asparagus and mushrooms (obviously!) but the real love comes from the cheese, crème fraiche, and the light fresh zing of the thyme and lemon zest!

Simply mix it all up and pile it gently into the center of your puff pastry sheets that have been scored around the edges to create a shell, or what I like to think of as a little dam of dough which keeps all the goodness from overflowing!




I served these individuals tarts with a green salad adorned with spiced pecans, orange segments, and warm goat cheese on toasted baguette slices.  It never hurts to add more cheese and bread to your meal of cheese and bread.  Hey, at least there are veggies in the mix!  Cheese and bread are my kryptonite!


I plan on making these tarts again, and again, and again!  They could even be done in miniature as a delicious appetizer.  Better still the filling is not limited to mushrooms and asparagus; the creative possibilities are endless, kind of like the puff pastry shell it calls home.

Wait!  I'm not finished yet!  Oh yea, the puff pastry love continues.

I was left with two small squares of puff pastry and no extra filling, so a few days later I popped the remaining dough into two ramekins, filled with banana slices tossed with a little sugar and butter, and viola desert! 


Topped with a scoop of vanilla of course!


OK, Now I'm finished. 



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