15 Minutes Quick Flaky Puff Pastry Dough| Less Butter Flaky Pastry Bites | Quick Puff Pastry Bites

cream cheese

🥗Healthier: Greek yogurt

💰Cheaper: ricotta cheese

Greek yogurt reduces calories while maintaining creaminess

cheese

🥗Healthier: nutritional yeast

💰Cheaper: processed cheese

Nutritional yeast is lower in fat and adds a cheesy flavor

ham

🥗Healthier: turkey

💰Cheaper: bacon

Turkey is leaner while bacon provides a similar texture and flavor

butter

🥗Healthier: olive oil

💰Cheaper: margarine

Olive oil is healthier, while margarine is a cost-effective alternative

Before preparing the dough, slice very cold butter into small cubes. Use a knife to slice butter and then a butter knife to detach the butter (try not to touch the butter as it may start to melt). To keep the butter solid, I like to keep the small butter cubes in the freezer while we mix the dry ingredients.

Into a bowl, add in the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder. Stir and combine everything together using a whisk until all our ingredients get evenly distributed in the flour. Now get the cold butter cubes out of the freezer and add them into the flour mix. Toss the butter in flour. And now you can easily squish the butter and they will get separated into small butter cubes. Now we get small pea-sized butter pieces homogeneously distributed in the flour.

Add cold milk, little by little into the flour mixture and, using a fork, gently toss and stir together until large lumps form and almost all of the flour has been moistened. We need to be careful while adding milk; if we add more milk, the pastry will become tough and hard. So it is better to add milk little by little and stop when the dough can be squeezed and pressed to form dough. We don’t want all our butter to get dissolved into the dough, and it is a good sign to see the butter pieces in between the dough.

Transfer the dough onto a lightly floured work surface. Using hands, squish the dough from sides and form a dough ball. Again squish and pat from top to form a flat square sheet. The dough may be slightly crumbly, but we don’t want it to be doughy in texture. Now using a bench scraper, cut the dough into 4 equal parts. Stack them one over the other. Squish and pat again to form a rough square. Again cut into 4 parts and stack them one over the other and then form a flat sheet of approximately 1/2 inch thick.

We can use a cookie cutter of different shapes to cut the dough and make flaky pastries. I used a small 2 1/4 inch round cookie cutter. In this way, we can make around 10 flaky puff pastry bites in total. We can stack the remaining pastry dough, squish and pat again to form a pastry sheet.

Place the cut pastries on a non-stick tray or a parchment-lined baking tray. Keep the tray covered in the freezer for 5-10 minutes. We need the butter to be cold and almost solid while we take it into the oven for baking.

Before taking them into the oven for baking, to make the crust shiny and golden, we can give an egg wash (which is optional). In a small bowl, whisk an egg for the egg wash. Remove the chilled pastry from the refrigerator, and lightly brush with the egg wash. If you want, you can sprinkle the top with some granulated sugar as well.

Place the baking tray onto a preheated oven at 425 degrees F or 220 C and bake for 16-18 minutes or until they turn golden brown on top.

Cooking Techniques

Equipment Needed

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Allergens