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.

This is one of those recipes that I have looked at over the years, in the cookbook, and thought about making, but never quite gotten around to making — clearly, I needed the kick in the ass of the Daring Bakers to get me hopping!  I’ve made “cheater” puff pastry before, but never made the real thing, assuming it was an overly onerous effort.

Having made the real deal now, I can tell you that, yes Virginia, this stuff really does puff like crazy! and with a splurge on premium butter, you won’t find anything comparable in your supermarket’s freezer case!  It does take a bit of work, but isn’t so difficult as to be unattainable.

The challenge here was to make the puff pastry using the recipe as written by Michel Richard, AND to make vol-au-vents.  I have nostalgic memories of these little shells being filled by my grandmother, with “chicken-ala king” (lots of cream of mushroom soup ), so with thoughts of days gone by, I decided to fill them with a mushroom version of the ala king — only made from scratch.

If you feel inclined to make this, it isn’t difficult, but you do need to set aside a morning or an afternoon.  It’s kind of like going to a horse show: there’s lots of waiting, interspersed with exciting moments of lots of activity.  For best results, you need to work fairly quickly while you have the dough out, and then back into the fridge it goes!

So here we go:

The dough that surrounds the buttery layers is pretty simple — just flour, salt and water, but it does use a combo of AP flour and cake flour, to cut down on the toughness.   The recipe in the book itself uses volume measures, but Steph, from A Whisk and a Spoon provided more exact weight measures.  The dough was actually pretty supple, and it needs to be to prevent the butter breaking through.

At this point, the whacking begins — there is a lot of whacking throughout to make things thinner without antagonizing the gluten in the flour too much.

First we whack the butter into a nice thinnish sheet:

Then the butter gets wrapped up in the dough, whacked, flattened and rolled once, before heading back into the fridge.

More rolling and folding and chilling

Six times in total for lots of flaky layer — this kind of goes exponentially, until your block of butter looks homogenously integrated into the dough (but its actually not, its teeny little layers!)

Finally, ready to roll out the dough and cut out the vol-au-vents. This dough is really nice to roll out and work with: it rolls out fairly easily and isn’t too elastic.   Quartz countertops definitely help with the rolling

These shrink a little bit as they bake, so I ended up going up a biscuit cutter size in diameter to cut out the bases.  A smaller one cut out of the centre makes a ring, which just gets stacked on top with a bit of egg wash between the layers.  Some folks had problems with egg-wash on the sides impeding the rise.  I dont think I was too careful when brushing it on and didn’t notice any problems with mine.

When baking these, I did find that I had to adjust the baking temperature for the second batch.  I baked the first as written in the recipe, and found it wasn’t quite hot enough at 400 for the initial bake.  I ended up baking at 425 for 12 minutes, then reducing the oven temperature to 350 and baking for another 15 minutes.

So finally, after all that rolling, folding, whacking, baking and cooling, these puppies were ready for filling.  We are getting some beautiful local wild mushrooms here, and I ended up using some fresh chanterelles with little baby cremini to make a creamy mushroom sauce with leeks, rosemary and sage.

Pretty tasty, kind of a la king -ish!  They hit the spot!

If you feel the urge to whack, roll and fold, and then indulge in buttery, flaky deliciousness, you can find the recipe on the Daring Kitchen website .

Here’s the ingredients for the filling:

Baby Cremini and Chanterelle sauce

• 1/4 lb. baby cremini
• 1/4 lb. chanterelles
• 2 Tb. butter
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. fresh rosemary, chopped
• 1/2 tsp fresh sage, chopped
• 1/2 cup leeks, sliced
• 1/4 cup dry vermouth
• 1/2 cup chicken stock
• 1/2 cup heavy cream