0 Vols-au-Vent

Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon was the gracious hostess of this month's Daring Bakers' challenge. She chose vols-au-vents made with homemade puff pastry. It's not the first time the Daring Bakers were challenged to make laminated dough. There was the Gateau St. Honore challenge in May 2007, the Danish braid in June 2008, and croissants in January 2007. Of those 3 challenges, I only took part in the Gateau St. Honore and we were not required to make our own puff pastry, so I used store bought for my St. Honore.

So this is my first time making puff pastry. I never tried before since it seemed too time consuming to make it myself when I can easily buy high quality all-butter puff pastry from the supermarket. Dufour makes a great puff pastry and so does Trader Joe's. Dufour costs $10/pound and Trader Joe's is much cheaper at $4/pound but my TJ no longer stocks it. But a challenge is a challenge and I was looking forward to trying my hand at making my own.

Steph was nice enough to link to a video of Michel Richard making puff pastry on PBS's Baking with Julia (Child that is). I remember seeing this many years ago when the TV series first aired and I thought that puff pastry was best left to the professionals. But as I watched that video earlier this week I thought that it seemed quite do-able. Of course Michel Richard made it look so easy. I mean, the man has been doing it for decades.

There is very little active time when making puff pastry. It's mostly waiting for the dough to rest. And the resting period between turns can be as little as 30 minutes and as long as a day so the dough making process was flexible enough to fit into my busy schedule. I did have some trouble when my beurrage (aka butter layer) broke through the dough layer after the third turn. Despite chilling it between turns, the butter was very obviously present with every subsequent turn. It seemed that my puff pastry was doomed to fail, but I completed my turns and hoped for the best.

Vols-au-vent is a puff pastry case designed to hold a filling. My vols-au-vent did rise pretty well so my worries about the butter breaking through the dough during the turns were put to rest. But I think I got some egg wash on the cut sides of my dough which prevented a higher rise. But it was still high enough to hold a decent amount of filling.


Steph gave us the freedom to fill it with anything. I decided to sauté some diced bananas in butter, brown sugar and lemon juice to make my filling. I wanted to top it with ice cream, but all we had in the house was pistachio ice cream. To complement the pistachio ice cream I made a praline. I caramelized some sugar (to the light amber stage), tossed in some pistachios, and spread them out on a Silpat to cool.



Even though I had a little mishap with the beurrage, I was very happy with my vols-au-vent and the puff pastry making process. And since I only used a third of the dough to make the vols-au-vent I still have lots of puff pastry for a future use. I'm really glad I finally made puff pastry and I will definitely be making my own from now on. And it's budget friendly too. It cost me less than $3.00 to make 2 1/2 pounds of all-butter puff pastry dough. That means my cost per pound is $1.20 which is a significant savings over buying all-butter puff pastry from the market. So thanks to hostess Steph, DB founders Lis and Ivonne and the rest of the DB gang.

The fine print:
The September 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan. 

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