Nicola Lamb’s pastry begins with dough folded over a layer of butter.īased on her forensic research, Lamb suspects the pastéis de Belem use margarine, and their soft consistency suggests the spreading technique, but though I try this in both Rebecca Seal and Mandy Lee’s recipes, I find it hard to keep the soft butter in the pastry, and it has a tendency to leak out in the oven. The second is camp ‘lock in’, which involves using firmer butter and a traditional method similar to how you’d approach a croissant or making puff pastry.” On one side you’ve got camp ‘spread’, a traditional method which involves smearing soft butter on to the dough and then performing the folds. As pastry chef Nicola Lamb observes in her incredibly detailed exploration of the subject on her Substack, Kitchen Projects (which should be required reading for nata nerds), “There are two camps when it comes to getting your butter into the dough. Having mixed flour and water, kneaded it until it comes together into a smooth dough (though a certain amount of gluten is required to hold the leaves together, overworking the dough will make it tough) and left this base pastry to rest, it’s time to introduce the butter. Unlike shortcrust, this is a laminated pastry in which the fat acts as a sandwich filling between sheets of dough, separating them into the shatteringly crisp layers that are the hallmark of a proper pastel de nata. (Lard or vegetable fat, with their lower moisture content, may give a crisper result, but they don’t taste as good, and I don’t find any recipes suggesting them, though Mendes does tip me off that “a bit of pork fat in the moulds is nice”.) Where they differ is largely in how much butter they use and how they get it into the pastry. The pastries I make myself all have the same basic ingredients: plain flour, salt, butter and just enough water to bind everything together. If you really must have pastéis de nata and can’t be bothered with the effort of making your own pastry, make sure you get the all-butter sort of puff and roll it as thinly as possible before shaping as below, or layer up sheets of filo spread with soft butter instead. I try Mendes’ recipe using ready-made puff pastry, and it just doesn’t give the same crunchy effect as the real deal, which sits somewhere between puff and filo. All thumbnail pictures by Felicity Cloake. Filo-like crunch: Rebecca Seal’s pastel de nata.
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