Forget what everyone’s told you about it not being worth it to make your own puff pastry! I remember hearing this from someone on the Food Network when I was young, so I never bothered to try and make it at home. While store-bought frozen puff pastry is convenient and reliable, this homemade version is so easy and so much better. No lamination is required for this rough puff method—just a vegetable peeler, a knife, and a whole lot of butter.

What’s the Difference Between Rough Puff Pastry and Puff Pastry?

The rough puff method of making puff pastry involves incorporating small pieces of cold butter into flour, and then hydrating the dough with cold water. Traditional puff pastry uses the lamination process to achieve those layers of flour and butter that result in puffy, flakey layers when baked. With rough puff, you will still get those layers, just likely not quite as uniform as in a traditional puff pastry.

Is Rough Puff Pastry Hard to Make?

Lamination of any type is a delicate process that can be hard to perfect! Since rough puff pastry skips that step, it’s the easiest way to make puff pastry. My recipe involves thinly slicing half the butter and using a vegetable peeler to make shards with the other half; the different sizes and thicknesses of the pieces of butter ensure that the majority of the flour will be layered with butter when rolled out.

Why Is It Called Rough Puff?

Rough puff pastry is just that: a rough version of the very precise regular puff pastry. It will puff roughly because of the less-uniform layers of butter throughout the dough. But it will indeed still puff, and well enough for almost any recipe you’d use store-bought puff pastry in at that!

Bake Notes

This dough is supposed to be shaggy and somewhat dry when you transfer it to the plastic wrap before the first chill, not so hydrated that it completely sticks together into a ball like most other doughs. The purpose of chilling it before performing the folds it to allow the flour to fully hydrate.
If while you’re rolling (either during the folds or after the final chill when you go to use it), the butter starts breaking through the surface of the dough, don’t worry! That’s what’s great about rough puff; it doesn’t have to be perfect and it will still turn out, even if some butter leaks. I actually prefer that because the bottoms of the pastries get very crispy in the melted butter.
This recipe can easily be doubled to make two sheets of dough. If doing so, cut the dough in half after the final letter fold and wrap each separately in plastic wrap, roll out, and chill or freeze both until you are ready to use them. Or use one day of and keep the other in your freezer for up to six months (wrapped well and stored in an air-tight container).
Once you make this, I promise you’re going to want to make it at least weekly. It’s so good, and there’s so much you can do with it. It can be baked into sweet pastries, like mini almond croissant cookies, or used to make savory appetizers, like individual eggplant parmesan puff pastries.

The Easiest Rough Puff Pastry Recipe

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5 from 2 reviews

Author: Grace
Total Time: 5 hours (including chilling time)
Yield: 1 sheet

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Description

This is a foolproof easy puff pastry recipe; the results are so worth the effort.

Ingredients

6 tbsp butter, frozen in stick form

6 tbsp butter, chilled in stick form

1 ¾ cup all-purpose flour

1 tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

Ice cold water

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Instructions

Fill a measuring cup or bowl with 2 cups of cold water and add a few ice cubes. Set it in the fridge to keep cold.
Slice the chilled butter into thin square-shaped slices. Spread them in a single layer on a plate and place the plate in the refrigerator so the butter stays cold.
In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, and salt together with a fork or a whisk.
Remove the rest of the butter from the freezer and wrap a paper towel around the bottom of it to use as a grip.
Gripping the part of the stick of butter with the paper towel wrapped around it, use a vegetable peeler to carefully peel the exposed butter into the bowl with the flour mixture. The shards of butter do not need to be any one size or thickness; you can turn the stick around and peel the corners, other sides, etc.
When you peel most of the exposed stick, carefully slide a little more out of the paper towel and peel what you can using the vegetable peeler. When the remaining piece of butter gets too small (aka dangerous) to peel, use a knife to thinly slice it as you did with the chilled butter.
Toss the shaved butter into the flour mixture with your hands.
Remove the plate of chilled butter and place the slices into the flour mixture. Toss together with your hands.
Add 3 tablespoons of the cold water into the bowl with the flour and butter. Use your hands to scoop the mixture from the bottom and then press down onto it from the top. Repeat this scooping and pressing, adding more water by the tablespoon, until the dough starts to come together.
Once the dough is clumping together into a very shaggy, dry-ish dough, turn it over onto a sheet of plastic wrap.
Use your hands to press the dough into a rectangle as best as you can. Wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate it for 2 hours.
After 2 hours, remove the dough from the refrigerator. Unwrap it and place the dough on a lightly floured surface.
Using a floured rolling pin, roll the dough up and down vertically into a rectangle that’s three times as long as it is wide.
Perform the first letter fold: take the bottom third of the dough and fold it up into the center.
Take the top third of the dough and fold it up into the center of the dough so it rests on top of the previous fold. You should now have a smaller rectangle with three equal layers of dough.
Turn the rectangle of dough so the exposed edge of the top fold is on the right side.
Again, roll the dough up and down vertically so it flattens once again into a rectangle that’s three times as long as it is wide.
Perform the same letter fold: Take the bottom third of the dough and fold it up into the center. Take the top third of the dough and fold it up into the center of the dough so it rests on top of the previous fold.
Again, turn the rectangle of dough so the exposed edge of the top fold is on the right side.
For the last time, roll the dough up and down vertically so it flattens into a rectangle that’s three times as long as it is wide.
Perform the last letter fold: Take the bottom third of the dough and fold it up into the center. Take the top third of the dough and fold it up into the center of the dough so it rests on top of the previous fold.
Make a “+” sign with two pieces of plastic wrap and place the dough in the middle. Wrap this smaller rectangle of dough loosely in plastic wrap on all sides and roll it out into a square or rectangle about ½-1 inch thick. Rolling it should push it into the corners of the plastic wrap.
Refrigerate the dough for at least 2 hours before using it. If you’re not going to use the dough within 24 hours, you can freeze it to use later. If frozen, let it thaw overnight in the refrigerator before use.