The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Technique

Letter-folding dough

6 dishes across 6 chapters · 0 marked cooked

From the Lexicon, Lamination

Folding a butter block into dough and rolling repeatedly to create alternating sheets, dozens to hundreds of layers, so oven heat turns the butter's water to steam and jacks the layers apart: croissants, puff pastry, danish, kouign-amann, and the medialuna's method. The disciplines: dough and butter at matched plasticity (cold but bendable: shattered butter means leaks; warm butter means brioche), rest between folds (gluten relaxes or it fights back), and counted turns (3 letter-folds ≈ 27 layers; 6 ≈ 729 for classic puff). 'Rough puff' cheats with butter chunks and honest speed. Lamination is pastry's showpiece of the principle that structure IS technique.

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This technique, on camera Search films of letter-folding dough

Georgia

Montana

Scandinavian

The Bakery

Vermont

Virginia