Paillettes au Parmesan

Paillettes au Parmesan (Parmesan puff-pastry straws) teach the stern little law of feuilletage, the laminated puff paste: chilled butter must meet a fully heated oven. Get that right and the narrow ribbons rise into fine, crisp layers, with Parmesan in the seams and cayenne flickering at the finish. Put them into a merely warm oven and the butter runs out before the structure sets.

The original entry assumes a pastry bench, several buttered trays, and an oven kept fiercely hot while many hands roll. At home, its two-thirds pound of butter becomes a quarter batch of 75 grams, enough for a generous dinner party and two home trays. The pastry bench and brigade quantity are scaffolding. A rolling pin, a ruler, and planned rests in the cold replace them honestly. The ten Parmesan-and-cayenne turns are the dish, so they stay.

Work in pairs of turns, chilling whenever the butter begins to soften, then cut the four-inch squares into true one-eighth-inch ribbons. The one step that decides everything is waiting at the end: preheat the oven for a full half hour, and keep the shaped feuilletage cold until it goes in. One cook, one stove, one evening.