humpday recipe: pastry

Confession.  I have never been very successful at making pastry.  It doesn’t matter how many times I try or how many different recipes I use it is either too dry to do anything with or wet and sticky like batter.  Useless.  Ma Yogini has similar problems.  The late great Nana Yogini was the pastry maker in our family,  a skill she seems to have taken to her grave.

According to folklore a person needs cold clammy hands to make good pastry.  I never thought there was much in this until Himself and his amazing pastry making hands came along.

I have never had to buy pastry since.  So whether it’s the hands or whether it’s just a family failing here is Himself’s secret pastry recipe.

Firstly find a person with cold clammy hands and get them to put 200g/8oz of plain flour into a bowl – you can use pastry flour but plain flour does just as well.  We’re using gluten free flour here to use it up.  This is not recommended unless you have to use gluten free for obvious reasons.

Then add a teaspoon of baking powder and 100g/4oz vegan margarine (OK you can use butter if you really want).

Now mix this together with your hands rubbing the margarine and flour between your fingertips until you get the consistency of breadcrumbs.  Do not cheat and use a food processor.  A food processor does not have cold clammy hands…

Add a splash of room temperature water to your breadcrumbs and keep working the mixture until it forms a ball.

Now comes the most important part of the process.  Himself says that this is the bit that is often missed and the reason why pastry making fails.  Watch closely…

Remember, you saw it here first! :p

Put the pastry in the fridge for half an hour.  Then it’s ready to use!

Now you need to roll out the pastry.  You need a lot of flour for this.  Flour your surface, flour the rolling pin and flour the pastry or it will stick.

Bits will break off.  It’s OK.

Now if you want to minimise the floury mess and not need an emergency session with the vacuum cleaner you could roll the pastry out between two sheets of greaseproof paper to stop sticking.  But isn’t mess half the fun of cooking?

But what are you going to do with your pastry?  Well anything you want dear reader but to find out what we did with ours you’ll have to tune in next week!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 9:15 am and is filed under recipes of the week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.