Puff Pastry Margarine?

After falling in love with Portuguese Custard Tarts called pasteis de nata (cream Pastry) or pasteis de Belem (from Belem, where the Jeronimo monastery needed to find a use for egg yolks after using the whites to starch laundry), I did a little research trying to find the 'original' recipe.


20130805 01 Pastel de Belem

Apparently, it's a state secret.

But there are imitators. The recipes differ on amount of cream versus milk, whole eggs versus yolks, but I ran into one interesting ingredient:
Puff Pastry Margarine was listed in creating the flaky layers of crust (which are very phyllo-like).

Has anyone ever heard of such a thing, or is it merely "real" stick margarine and not the kind of water-based crud you get in tubs?

Or should I just go with real butter?

Joel-

I'm not sure what puff pastry margarine is, but I'd be willing to be a taste tester as you and Sue work through different attempts of the recipe.

Hi,

My guess it will be a Crisco type product. Margarine's softens so easily, it would be challenging to impossible to work with.

I might be inclined to use Crisco as-is or their butter flavored Crisco, which may be what they are really thinking of.

Regards,

Assuming that Portuguese Custard tarts are a "traditional" pastry and not invented in the mid 20th century, I'd guess you'd be more authentic using butter rather than some form of margarine.

rickster wrote:Assuming that Portuguese Custard tarts are a "traditional" pastry and not invented in the mid 20th century, I'd guess you'd be more authentic using butter rather than some form of margarine.

Or just as likely lard (which, like Crisco, offers good flakiness), because butter was something you could sell.

Regards,

When you buy puff pastry in the store, other than the Doufour (sp?) brand, it's pretty much all made with margarine or vegetable shortening (or worse).

P.S. Pasteis de Nata, or Portuguese Custard Tarts are some of my all time favorite pastry items. If you need a tester, please let me know.

Margarine can be made with different types of oils (and other things) to achieve different ends. In the case of puff pastry margarine, one would want a margarine that can be rolled and folded many times without melting or breaking down. Here's a page for a supplier that gives you and idea of who might want this stuff.

You wouldn't want to bother with this stuff at home.

Darren72 wrote:Margarine can be made with different types of oils (and other things) to achieve different ends. In the case of puff pastry margarine, one would want a margarine that can be rolled and folded many times without melting or breaking down. Here's a page for a supplier that gives you and idea of who might want this stuff.

You wouldn't want to bother with this stuff at home.

Exactly this, with the added comment that it would be difficult to get this stuff at home. I think you might be able to order small packages from Amazon, but it's mostly sold in 20 or 40 lb./10 or 20kg packages by suppliers to the baking trade. Store-bought frozen puff pastry most likely uses this stuff as an ingredient.

Suffice it to say that like many food ingredients it's a highly engineered product. I'm told the desired property is analogous to 'malleability' in metals -- you want to be able to spread this stuff out into a very thin, unbroken, but still solid layer of fat in between the layers of dough. I'm also told that this stuff's physical properties are superior to butter's in this respect, enabling the baker to make a much puffier puff pastry. Butter will eventually liquefy a little and get too thin in spots.

(I'm sort of in the business -- electrical controls guy, capital equipment biz -- but I wouldn't be at liberty to say much more than this even if I did know more about the oil blends they use for this stuff. I don't need to know that detail in order to do my job, and I haven't had this gig long enough to pick up too much trivia. I've only started up two margarine production lines so far.)

Whether you're trading a little flavor for better puffiness by using puff pastry margarine, a baker's going to have to answer that one.