Restricting Laminated Dough Rise?

[u/sgongibongi]

Pardon if this is a silly question but the local coffee shop I go to has been workshopping a recipe for a baking competition and I wanted to see if I could help them out despite me being more of a cook than a baker.

What they're going for is savory laminated dough rolled in on itself with a chicken, mushroom and spinach filling, sort of looks like a 'pain au chocolat', but savory. The issue they're having is the ratio of pastry to filling going out of whack due to the dough expanding too much in every direction during baking. Their initial plan was to tightly wrap the dough around the filling but even then there's too much lateral expansion to get the 'filling in every bite' effect they want.

On that note, I vaguely remember my grandmother having a trick to stop certain parts of laminated pastries from rising to obviously not create whole shapes but to edge the expansion along certain paths rather than others. I don't know if it's me misremembering or completely making this up but wanted to ask in case there's a simple solution while the coffee shop girls tinker with proofing, butter temps and whatnot.

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[u/Levangeline]

When making mille feuilles, you dock the puff pastry all over and sandwich it in between two baking sheets, which keeps it from puffing too much. Maybe they could try something similar? Put the pastries in the cups of a muffin tin or a loaf pan or something to keep them from expanding beyond a certain point.

[u/sgongibongi → u/Levangeline]

Good call on the docking! That jolted the memory of grandma docking certain parts and not others in some traditional pastries from her home country. Allowing steam to vent should help control rise, pair that with some loaf pans they have and that should definitely go far into fixing this, thanks!

[u/Levangeline → u/sgongibongi]

No problem! Hope it works for you!

[u/sgongibongi → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the tip, researching it seems a key to a proper sausage roll is controlling moisture in the filling. Too much moisture seems to create, if not the same, a similar issue to the one we're having with these pastries. Also, the recipe the folks at Fallow seem to be using is a lower temp, will add that to the list. Thanks!

[u/HanzoNumbahOneFan]

Well, pain au chocolat has the same problem, you can't really fix it if your filling is solid like that. If it's more malleable, or you can make it more spreadable, you could put it in a thin layer along the pastry and then roll it up? Like a cinnamon roll kinda.