Recipe: Turnover Dough

I've decided I'll make turnovers tomorrow, so I needed to prepare the dough today. Admittedly, this is one of the foods I went out of my way to practice when I was planning this project, since I wasn't too confident with baking and I wasn't too sure where to start when it came to making turnovers. It turned out that the part most people focussed on in a turnover recipe was the filling, with many online recipes recommending the purchase of pre-made puff pastry dough.

No such thing is on sale in the Czech Republic, in fact, considering the amount of bake-it-yourself kits there are on sale in the supermarkets, the Czechs, it seems, are still preoccuppied with cooking everything yourself. From scratch if possible. So it was a life-saver when I found a basic recipe for the dough that I could make myself.

INGREDIENTS

Flour

Butter (not spreadable! traditional)

Some cold water

Step 1: Find yourself a mixing bowl, or a large plastic tupperware container. Depending on if you want to make 4 or 8 turnovers, you will either need 1 mug full of flour (for 4) or 2 mugs (for 8). Pour said flour into container/mixing bowl.

Step 2: Cut 'sticks' of butter and add them to the mix. Not necessarily all at once. Have 8 sticks if you prepared 1 mug of flour, 12 if you prepared 2 mugs. Add those sticks to the mixture, have extra sticks prepared.

Step 3: Trickle in little amounts of water. Take a stirrer and quickly mix together the mixture. Once it stiffens, abandon the stirrer and knead the forming dough with your hands. The idea is that all the flour you've added earlier should become part of the dough.

Step 4: Continue kneading until all the flour is used. Trickle in more water to make the mixture stick, add more butter to increase the mass of the dough. If you find you have poured in too much water and the ball of dough is becoming too sticky, add more flour to dry it.

Step 5: Once the ball of dough has been formed of all the contents in the mixing bowl (or large tupperware) and it's dry enough, sprinkle flour onto a table top, plonk the dough ball on it and take a rolling pin. Roll out the dough until it is an even sheet about a fingertip thick (said fingertip pressing against a table), try to keep it as rectangular as possible. (My dough sheets tend to be ovals.)

Step 6: Fold into quarters and either a) wrap it in cling film or b) place the folded sheet in an uncovered, exposed container. Put the sheet in the fridge. It has to be left there for either a few hours or overnight, to make sure it hardens.