Vegetable Puffs With Puff Pastry Sheets

When I was in India, I used to drool over a lot of food blogs of people abroad, mainly at all the ingredients they got to cook with. Among fresh berries and different kinds of chocolate and cheese was puff pastry sheets. I was quite amazed at how much difference it can make to baking something like puffs or twisted puff snacks and tons of other variations to these.

I bought my first packet a few weeks ago and it stayed in my freezer till my India trip was over. When it finally reached a point when I had no more excuses to postpone using it, I did!

The first thing I did was to look online for help on how to start using it. The packet had no instructions except to say "thaw for 30 mins to an hour before use". That was well and good but how exactly do I use this chunk of frozen pastry sheets? I searched online for difference things - how to use puff pastry sheets? how to roll out puff pastry? how to divide puff pastry and all synonyms of words in here. I checked some blogs that I remembered had used these but they seemed to know how to since they had lovely pics of puffs - their final products!

I even checked Youtube but nothing useful came up. Then I just guessed my way through it and turned up with pretty awesome vegetable puffs. Here's how.


How to Thaw and Use Puff Pastry Sheets:

1. Take out the packet about 2 hours before you want to use it. Mine took about 2.5 hours to thaw completely and become soft. It will be a big block.

2. Place it on a liberally floured surface and roll it out firmly to about 1/2" thickness. You will get a biggish rectangular piece of puff pastry.

3. Cut out into long rectangles for puffs or other shapes depending on your use.

That's it. That's what I did.

When you make vegetable puffs, the filling is very flexible too. You can pretty much make and add anything. Here's what I did.

Vegetable Puffs Filling Recipe

What I Used:
Makes 8 puffs

Mixed vegetables - 1 cup (I used carrots, French beans, sweet corn and green peas)
Onions - 2, sliced long
Tomatoes - 2, chopped
Capsicum / green bell pepper - 1/2 cup, chopped
Coriander powder /malli podi - 1 tbsp
Jeera /cumin seeds / jeerakam - 1 tsp
Red chilli powder - 1 tsp or to taste
Ginger garlic paste - 1 tsp
Curry leaves - a few
Oil - 1 tbsp
Sugar - a pinch
Salt - to taste

How I Made It:

1. Boil the vegetables until soft and keep aside.

2. Heat oil and saute the onions until golden brown. Add the curry leaves, coriander powder, chilli powder and jeera. Fry for 30 seconds.

3. Add the ginger garlic paste and fry for another minute.

4. Now add the tomatoes and capsicum and fry well till its blended well.

5. Finally add the vegetables and salt and sugar and mix well. Cook on open fire for about 5 mins. Don't add water at any stage. The filling should be moist yet thick.

To Assemble Puffs Before Baking:

- Take a rectangular strip of rolled out puff pasty sheet and spoon in some filling on one end, leaving enough space on all sides to 'seal' the puff.

- Bring in the other end and seal off the sides. The puff pastry is usually sticky so you wouldn't need anything else to seal it up.

Baking

Bake in a preheated oven at 220 Centrigrade for 30 mins until the top is golden brown. You can brush on some egg white while still warm out of the oven to make it look prettier and glossier.

If you want to make egg puffs, add hard boiled eggs in the place of vegetables. Place half an egg in each puff.