Whole Wheat Puff Pastry

Forgive these pictures. I normally try to wait to make and photograph food until the light is good but one night I came home from work and decided I AM MAKING WHOLE WHEAT PUFF PASTRY TONIGHT, LIGHT BE DAMNED!

So....I did. Thusly the lighting in these photos is meh. But stick with me because homemade puff pastry is awesome, but now...not only can you make it preservative-free, you can also make it WITH WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR! I mean...I'm not gonna say it's healthy. There's a lot of butter. But ya know...it's better.

Don't be intimidated by the idea of making homemade puff pastry. It's slightly time intensive but only because you have to chill the dough a bunch of times-so you can do other stuff while the dough chills. You can do laundry, make other food, clean, watch TV....ya know...productive stuff.

But the actual work put in is crazy simple. The hardest part is using your muscles to roll out the dough. Which isn't hard. If my wimpy arms can do it, so can yours!

Then, once you've made your puff pastry, you divide it into thirds--or fourths (because a package of puff pastry is generally about 1 lb. and these recipe yields 3-4 lbs.--this will make it easier to use when you're making recipes that call for the storebought stuff) and then stick it in the refrigerator or freezer. Hooray! And when you bake up the pastry it's wonderfully flaky and buttery (although, sure, less flaky than with white flour) and has this awesome earthy, almost nutty, quality from the whole wheat flour. It's awesome. 

You'll see!

Homemade Puff Pastry

Ughhh you GUYS! I cannot believe I haven't shared this with you yet! "bad food blogger, bad!"

Um...you may have noticed I've developed a borderline unhealthy addiction to spinach & brie puff pastries. Liiiike...poor Michael jokes that I "supposedly" make them but he wouldn't know because they're uhhh...gone...by the time he gets home. And we're talkin' about me making double batches...8 puffs....oops. 

#sorryimnotsorry

Anywho, since I've been using so much puff pastry, I really wanted to tackle making the stuff from scratch. But I was intimidated. But I told myself "KAYLE! You've gotta buck up and take on this challenge!" So I did. And surprisingly, not that difficult. Yes, there are some steps. But they're pretty simple (especially since I've provided you with a step by step photo guide ;P) and I've already made the homemade puff pastry twice.

I will share with you one downside to these: you end up with blocks of dough instead of the sheets you buy, so when you go to roll out the dough um...it's hard. Like...really hard. I get a goooood work out trying to roll that chunk of dough into a thin sheet. But it's do-able and I always get through it. And if me and my tiny, weak, arms can do it-SO CAN YOU!