Homemade vol au vent are delicious puff pastry baskets to fill and serve as an appetizer, with aperitif or as finger food at a buffet. You can find them ready to fill, but making them at home is very simple and in a few minutes you’ll have fragrant homemade vol au vent ready to fill as you like. What do you say, shall we try?
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- Difficulty: Easy
- Cost: Cheap
- Preparation time: 15 Minutes
- Portions: 6 vol au vent
- Cooking methods: Electric Oven
- Cuisine: French
- Seasonality: All Seasons
Ingredients
- 1 sheet puff pastry
- 1 egg yolk
Tools
- 1 round cookie cutter of 1.2 and 2 inches
Steps
For this preparation, the puff pastry needs to be well chilled. It might be helpful to put it back in the fridge (or the freezer for a few minutes if the temperature at home is particularly high) after cutting the vol au vent and before assembling them.
Preheat the oven to 392 °F.
Unroll the puff pastry and cut out many circles using the 2-inch cookie cutter (if you work carefully, trying to make the most of the pastry, you will get 24 circles). Take 6 circles and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Poke them with a fork. On the remaining 18 circles, make a central hole with the 1.2-inch cookie cutter. Brush the whole circles with the beaten egg yolk. Place the holed circles on top of the whole ones (you can stack three or five depending on how tall you want the vol au vents). Brush the holed circles with the yolk as well. Lower the oven temperature to 338 °F and bake the vol au vent for 20 minutes.
Once ready (they should be nicely golden), take them out of the oven and let them cool before filling.
Curiosity
Their name, vol au vent, in French literally means “flight in the wind” and probably derives from the fact that they are so light that they can be carried away by the wind. It is said that the French chef Marie Antoine Careme invented them, although in a cookbook predating his birth, there is mention of a pastry called “wind tart.” A famous variant of the vol au vent is the “bouchée à la reine” or the queen’s mouthful, typical of Lorraine and dedicated to the wife of Louis XV.
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