Classic Asparagus Tarts

I don’t know about you, but there are few things I love more than a buttery, flaky, cheesy pastry. Add some delicious spring veggies like the asparagus here and you have an amazing combination. Serve this room temperature in slices with a glass of white wine for a Saturday afternoon get-together.

Even better, serve these asparagus tarts warm with a poached egg on top with a mimosa for a beyond brunch treat. Don’t get scared, I’ll talk you through all the steps to accomplish this classic asparagus tart.

Laminated Dough – What Now?!?

For these classic asparagus tarts, we are using puff pastry. Puff pastry, the kind you see in the store in those little cardboard boxes in the freezer section, you know the ones, are a kind of “laminated dough.”

A laminated dough is any dough made by a process of creating layers of chilled butter in dough (called laminating) to produce a buttery, flaky pastry.

Think croissants, pane au chocolat, danishes, kougin amann, really anything delicious at a french bakery. All of the ice cold layers of butter in the dough will release steam as soon as they hit the heat of the oven.

When the steam is released, your dough will puff up and you will see those lovely layers emerge. You can 100% absolutely, zero judgment use a frozen puff pastry for this recipe. Grab a version made with all-butter for the best flavor and continue along with the rest of the recipe outlined for a quick and delicious tart.

If you like a little bit of lazy day project and want to impress your friends with your mad laminating skills, this is the recipe for you.

Basics of Laminated Dough

Laminated dough does not require a lot of ingredients. Some doughs like croissant use yeast to create a more bready texture.

But for our classic full puff pastry, we are using only the butter as our leavening agent. A little lemon juice helps tenderize the dough and a little sugar assists with browning.

To make the dough base, we throw all the ingredients together and let the mixer do the work if you have one. (Pro tip: never turn your back when mixing dough in your mixer. I can’t tell you how many times my Kitchenaid has almost danced off the counter while kneading dough when I wasn’t looking).

Now that we have the dough prepped for the classic asparagus tart, it’s time to tackle the beurreage aka a big old block of butter. This is your magic maker, plus you get to get out out some aggression at the same time.

Take you chilled, rock hard butter, and place it between two sheets of parchment with just a very light dusting of flour. The flour is going to help your butter block stay workable (our workable goal is chilled but still malleable. You should be able to bend the butter).

Now, take a rolling pin and really whack the heck out of that butter. Show it who’s boss. Once you get a nice flat layer, dust a little more flour on top and fold the butter in on top of itself and start whacking away again.

Continue this until your butter hits that perfect workable consistency, or until all that pent up rage is released – a few extra whacks isn’t going to hurt anything, I promise not to squeal on you.

Creating Laminated Dough

With our two components ready, the dough and the beurreage, it’s time to begin laminating – making all those layers of butter-dough-butter-dough. Roll the dough out and seal in that block of butter inside – this is your first layer of lamination.

But just one big layer of butter isn’t going to work well, we need dozens if not hundreds (ok, not hundreds, but we need lots and lots of layers). To achieve all those layers, we need to start folding that dough.

The first fold is a “tri-fold”. Picture folding a piece of paper in three to place in an envelope. Roll your dough out to a rectangle, and brush the dough very lightly with ice cold water. The water will help the dough hold together.

Fold one short side over 1/3. Fold the other short side on top to meet the edge. Literally just like a sheet of paper with three layers. Rotate your dough 90° and give it just a slight roll to smooth it out.Wrap the dough tightly and place in the fridge to chill for at least 30 minutes.

This is an important step, please, please, please don’t skip these chills. It doesn’t take much for the butter to start melting into the dough and you will start to lose all those layers you worked so hard to create. The end result will be more like a brioche bread than a puff pastry. Still delicious, but not our goal here.

The steps above – rolling, folding, rotating – are called a “turn”. You’ve just completed your first “turn”. We will do a total of 4 turns on this dough.

Creating Laminated Dough Layers

Our second turn will incorporate a “book fold”. Using a book fold will give us additional layers, but using all book turns can be too stressful on our beautiful butter.

To create a book fold, roll the dough out to a rectangle. The short edge should be opposite from the previous turn so that the folds will criss-cross. Brush lightly with water.

Take one short edge and bring it to the center of the dough. Take the opposite short edge to the center to meet it in the middle. Now fold the whole thing in half like you are closing a book. You should have created four folds in your dough. Turn the dough 90° wrap tightly and chill again.

Repeat a tri-fold for your third turn.

Repeat a book fold for your forth and final turn.

That’s it! You have successfully created loads of butter layers (it’s math I can’t do, ok, just know we’ve made a lot layers) and are now ready to use your dough for any puff pastry recipe out there, including our asparagus tarts.

If you’d like to prepare the dough in advance, I prefer to finish the final turn then wrap tightly and freeze. Then I can pull the dough out and defrost just like those packaged doughs. You can also freeze right after the first turn then defrost and continue the rest of the folds. I find it more different to get the butter the right temperature for folds this way, but it can be done.