I distinctly remember making puff pastry as an apprentice and loathing every minute of it. Making home-made puff pastry involves encasing butter in a base dough, followed by a series of turns, folds and rolls; resting the pastry after each roll, until you have created many layers of dough and butter resulting in up to a 1000 laminations of pastry. I think with every turn, I would hope and pray that I wouldn’t have to make it very often.

Thankfully the advent of frozen puff pastry means that I, and you, don’t have to bother with the laborious task of making our own.

Freezing the pastry doesn’t harm the product at all and is actually ideal for ease of transportation and storage.

A few years ago, a chef by the name of William Wood worked for me and, having been classically trained, he was always disappointed with the puff pastry that was available commercially and vowed he would manufacture his own. It’s taken him a few years but Wood had lunch at e’cco recently with John MacDonald from Palatable Partners, a speciality food supplier and now Queensland distributor for Wood’s puff pastry, Carême, aptly named after the famous French pastry chef.

With a 5kg roll of Carême in tow for me to sample, Wood explained that after trying nearly all the local butters with limited success, he was about to give up when he finally managed to find the right one, and basically without Corman, a superior butter from Belgium, Carême Pastry would never have eventuated.

The quality of the butter helps to form a barrier between the layers created by the rolling process, allowing it to rise cleanly and create crisp individual layers of pastry. Most commercial puff pastry is made with margarine where often the layers stick together and the resulting cooked pastry is doughy rather than light and crisp, so they don’t even compare with the quality of a good butter puff. Having tried Carême myself, it will be very hard to use anything else.

Carême butter puff pastry is great to use for both savoury and sweet dishes and is available at Rosalie fruit Market, Rosalie; Feast on fruit, Morningside Central; Susan’s Gourmet, Manly; Thynne Road Deli, Morningside; Fig Tree Deli, Camp Hill; Plenty at Eight Mile Plains, or you can call John MacDonald at Palatable Partners on 07 3899 5266.