Handmade Flaky Rough Puff Pastry Pistachio & Custard Squares | Recipe

How's it going you awesome bunch of bakers? I hope you're having a great day so far. Welcome back to the channel. Today we're making rough puff pastry again. So let's get in the kitchen and get started. It's been quite some time since we made rough puff pastry and it being sweet treat season I thought it would be a good idea to make something new with it. Rough puff pastry is very versatile. They can be used in sweet as well as savory applications. You can find a good few examples of this on my channel. Cheese straws, sausage rolls, pasties. This time we've got a buttery flaky pastry topped with a baked custard and some pistachios. It's basic, it's easy, it doesn't require a lot of ingredients so it's a good last minute treat for your new year's celebrations. So let me show you how it's done so you can make yours. For the pastry we'll need some white bread flour, cold cubed butter cut into one inch pieces, some salt and some cold water. If you want to make the pastry sweeter you could add some sugar to it but for me the other ingredients make it sweet enough. The butter and the water must be cold otherwise you'll end up with dough not pastry. Keep them in the fridge until the moment you're ready to make the pastry. For the custard we'll need an egg yolk, sugar, vanilla paste, vanilla syrup or vanilla essence, some cornstarch and milk. We'll need some chopped pistachios for decorating, an egg for glazing the pastry and some sugar and water for a syrup that we're going to make and brush onto the pastries when they come out the oven. When it comes to the equipment we need a tray with some non-stick paper, bowl, scales, a dough scraper, a rolling pin, a brush, we'll need a pot and a whisk for making the custard and a piping bag would come in handy but you don't need this. You can just spoon the custard onto the pastry. Okay let's begin. In a large bowl combine the flour and the salt and give it a quick mix. Then add the butter cubes and coat them in flour. What follows is extremely important. We don't have to crumble the butter into the flour. This is not biscuit dough. The butter must remain nice and chunky. So instead of crumbling you're going to pick up each piece of butter and break it into four or five pieces and no more. Each piece of butter should not be handled more than once. As you break the butter up keep coating it in flour. Once all the butter is broken and coated you can add the final ingredient, the cold water. Now grab your dough scraper and start mixing. Then continue on by hand. We're not trying to knead this dough. Instead try to press it and squish it together until there's no dry flour left. There may be some dry floury bits but that's totally fine. At first the dough will look a little bit rough and uneven but don't worry about that. It's normal. That's exactly how it should be. Before we start rolling this dough out and folding it up to turn it into a pastry we need to cool it down. That'll make our life a lot easier. So wrap the dough up in some cling film and pop it in the fridge for around 40 minutes. You can of course leave it in there for longer but 40 minutes is about minimum. Once the time's up pull the dough out of the fridge, take it out of the cling film, dust it generously with flour and start rolling it out. You want to roll it to about three times its length and again it's going to be a little bit uneven, a little bit rough around the edges. Don't worry about that. Just even it out as much as you can. Once you're happy with the length turn the dough horizontally in front of you and then fold it up in three layers. Keep the folded up dough in the same orientation because now we need to roll it out once again in the direction of the two open ends. Roll it to about double its length and now perform the same type of fold as previously, folding it up into three layers. So we've gone from a dough with no layers to a pastry with nine layers but we're not ready yet. We need about 27 for this to be a nice flaky pastry. So once again wrap it up in cling film and pop it back into the fridge for another 40 minutes of chilling. During this time the gluten will relax and make it easier for us to roll it out again and the second set of folds is exactly the same as the first. Roll the pastry in the direction of the two open ends, get it to about three times its length, then fold it up into three layers and repeat one more time. And now it just needs to be chilled down one more time for 40 minutes before we can use it. Whilst it's chilling we can start preheating our oven. 180 degrees celsius, 355 fahrenheit, fan on. Whilst the pastry is chilling and the oven is preheating let's make the custard. First combine the sugar and the cornstarch in a small pan, then mix them together. You want to get rid of any lumps. Next add the egg yolk, the vanilla and the milk. This is the easiest custard recipe you'll ever make because all the ingredients are going in at once. Give everything a good mix then place it on medium to high heat on the cooker. Keep whisking and warming the liquid until it becomes thick and then take it off immediately. And that's your custard. Takes about three minutes. If you are using a piping bag you can pour the custard straight into it once it comes off the heat. Alternatively just transfer it to a bowl and leave it to cool down. Or whatever you're using, be it a piping bag or bowl, tie it up or cover it and place it in the fridge to cool down. Once it has cooled you can either whisk it up if it's in a bowl or you can squish the piping bag to ensure that it's not lumpy. Okay once the timer goes off pull the pastry out the fridge. Now we can do the final shaping. Once again dust it with flour generously. Now you can grab a rolling pin and press it like this. This will help it roll out more evenly and then roll it out to a large rectangle. We're making eight pastries and each of the pastry squares should be around 10 times 10 centimeters and that is four inches by four inches. So the piece of pastry should be 40 centimeters long and 20 centimeters wide which will be about 16 inches by 8 inches. Of course you need to roll it slightly larger because you need to trim the edges off and for some reason I didn't pay attention I rolled mine slightly too big so I ended up trimming quite a lot off. Of course I didn't discard the scraps, I still baked them. Now when it comes to cutting you can use a knife, just be careful not to ruin your table. You can place the pastry on a chopping board or a piece of baking paper or just be real careful and don't cut in a sawing motion just press the knife straight up and down. If you have a pizza cutter use that, it's the best tool for the job. Okay pastry squares cut up now we can give them some shape. Cross two corners over in the middle and press them together and then do the same with the remaining two corners. This is a nice basic shape, it looks good and it's easy to make but there are plenty of others you could do that also start with little squares. You could just stop by folding two corners over in the middle leaving the other two sticking out and pointy or you could cut diagonal lines from each corner and then fold over every other corner to create a star shape but I'll leave those experiments up to you. Okay once you finish shaping place your pastry squares on a non-stick paper lined baking tray then create some more space for the custard by pressing your fingers into the middle of the square. Now take the egg and glaze the pastry all over and next up pipe the custard right in the middle of each piece. There is just enough custard for all of them so don't put too much in the first ones because you don't want to run out by the last one. Take a spatula or spoon and even out the surface of the custard if need be and finally add a pinch of chopped pistachio to each blob of custard and then gently press the pistachios in so they don't fall off. These bad boys are ready for the oven so let's bake them. They'll take around 25 minutes and just before they're ready to come out the oven let's make the hot sugar syrup. Combine the sugar and the water in a small pan and bring them up to a boil. Once your pastries are nicely golden brown all over pull them out of the oven and brush them with hot sugar syrup as soon as they come out. This will make them nice and shiny, sweet and sticky. The dough doesn't contain any sugar so this makes up for it and even with this it's not a very sweet treat. It's a light little snack that you can have with your tea or with your coffee and there you have it that's how you make rough puff pastry squares with custard and pistachio. You could use this pastry for many different projects some of which you can find in pastry playlists on my channel. You could also play around with this recipe to make it your own, change the shape of it, flavor the custard with something or use a different topping or use different nuts. Whatever you decide to do it'll be nice and flaky and tasty. So what do you think of rough puff pastry? Have you ever tried making it? Have you ever tried any of my rough puff pastry recipes? Let me know down in the comments. You want to see more videos like this one click over here, subscribe to the channel click right here. That's all I have for you today. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.