Flaky Apple Turnovers

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was picked by Julie of Someone’s in the Kitchen. She picked the Flaky Apple Turnovers and you can visit her blog for the complete recipe. I was fairly excited to make these turnovers, since I love apple desserts. Apple crisp, apple pie, and so on. If it is made with apples, I’ll probably like it.

This recipe starts with you making a variation of puff pastry. If this had been traditional puff pastry, I would have just skipped it. Puff pastry requires that you form butter into a rectangle, seal dough around the butter rectangle, then roll it out, fold in thirds, and repeat many, many times until you have super flaky dough. Luckily, this recipe doesn’t require this method. This recipe has you cut butter into flour, and then add sour cream. You have to refrigerate it a lot, but the recipe is certainly more stream-lined than puff pastry.

Well, despite this being an easier recipe, I had nothing but trouble making the pastry for the turnovers! I couldn’t get the butter cut in well enough, and when I added the sour cream I couldn’t get the dough to be cohesive. It was basically nothing but a crumbly mess. I tried to form it into rectangles for the first chilling, but it was still very crumbly and I was doubtful that it would come together. After the first chilling, one half of the dough was a complete mess and I just gave up on that, but the other half of the dough seemed workable (but still crumbly) and I rolled it out and chilled it for the second chilling. I was cautiously hopeful that I could make a couple of successful turnovers.

After the second chilling, you have to roll out of the dough, 1/8” thick, to a big rectangle. The dough was so hard to roll out! It took me about 30 minutes of hard work to get the dough rolled thin, and I still don’t think that I got it thin enough. By that time, the dough had warmed up so much that it was very stretchy and I knew that was bad news. It was too awkward to refrigerate it again. I tried to cut out circles, and I also had a cute apple shaped pocket pie maker. The dough was so warm and stretchy that nothing tuned out very well. I think I got two apple shaped turnovers and 2 regular turnovers out of the batch of dough. It felt wasteful but it was the best I could do this week.

Despite all of the troubles, the turnovers do taste good, despite the fact that they don’t look very good. I don’t think that they were worth all of the trouble; instead I would just use traditional pastry. It might not be as flaky, but it would certainly be easier to make!

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 316 and 317.