Tourage for puff pastry
Tourage is the process, a French culinary technique (where else?), for making the delectable puff pastry, the super-flakey pastry that is part of both sweet and savoury dishes.
It’s a classic and difficult technique that has been used for hundreds and hundreds of years, likely originating in the Middle East.
Puff pastry, by virtue of the tourage technique, is a dough folded repeatedly into thirds, rolled out and folded into thirds again: the result is hundreds of flakey layers of pastry.
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The introduction of a fat — butter — onto the dough as it is rolled creates an environment for the puff. Turning, rolling and refrigerating and resting the fat-laden dough six times is brilliantly efficient and really quite a remarkable example of math at work in the kitchen.
In fact. more than 700 layers of very, very thin pastry, after resting and cooling, virtually explode in a hot oven when the air and moisture essentially vaporize and drive the puff pastry to heights four times in size.
![](https://andrewcoppolino.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Puff-pastry-640x427.jpg)
While the process of tourage for making puff pastry is laborious and time consuming, commercial puff pastry is available at better grocery stores.
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