Blood Orange Turnovers

and my go-to rough puff pastry

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Hello, Happy Friday!

This past week the building work at the house entered the ‘ungodly loud’ stage; with saws and drills directly under my temporary kitchen all hours of the day. To get a bit of peace and find somewhere a little easier to work I have escaped up north to visit my parents and take over their kitchen for a week. The building work has been making me feel rather stressed and a bit overwhelmed and in the past couple weeks I have countered that with comfort food. For an alternative approach this week I tried going in the opposite direction, making more of a project bake, something to lose myself in.

I had this idea a few weeks ago: to make a small turnover-style pastry but to leave it unfilled when the pastry is baked in an attempt to create a cavity that can be filled once baked and cooled. The idea was to use a filling that couldn’t be baked, a ganache maybe? Or a cream filling? I ended up settling on using a variation of a favourite curd, a very thick lemon curd that I have used in the past as a tart or cake filling. It is thick and incredibly creamy and still deliciously tangy. As we are in the middle of citrus season, I decided to switch out the lemon and use blood orange instead. This turned out to be a problem, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The orange cream is a version of a classic lemon curd, but the ratios used are changed slightly, as is the method. The finished texture is much thicker than a classic curd, and once chilled, it holds its shape beautifully, making it perfect as a filling for tarts or cakes. This style of curd was widely popularised by

Dorie Greenspan

when she was working with pastry chef Pierre Hermé on his English-language cookbooks in the late 90s and early 2000s. A similar recipe, from

Liz Prueitt

, in the Tartine cookbook, also helped push this style of recipe into the public imagination (her lemon tart at Tartine is simple perfection).

To encase this delicious (eventually) cream, I wanted a light and flaky pastry, so obviously I turned to rough puff pastry. While I am one of those people that does actually quite enjoy making puff pastry the traditional way, I understand that not everyone has the patience or desire. Thankfully, rough puff pastry is a truly excellent alternative. Still incredibly flaky, it is just easier to make, less fussy, and more user-friendly. The recipe below is enough to make 12 small hand pies, but should you want something a little more substantial, feel free to make them larger, making a smaller batch of pies.

The Case For Citric Acid

Before we get to the final recipe, let's talk about the cream because it took a few tries to make this as tasty as I intended. Oranges have less acid than lemons, and so less sugar is generally used to prevent the curd from becoming too sweet. This lack of acid can make you run into a problem, an unfortunately bland curd, the butter masking any of those bright citrus notes. This is especially true with this cream style of curd, which uses a significantly large proportion of butter. The first test of this recipe was just, meh.

The easiest way to counter this problem is to use a 1:2 blend of lemon and orange juice. The acidity and brightness of the lemon help to balance everything in the curd. This works well, but I really wanted this to be an orange curd where the orange flavour was punchy.

The answer to this quandary was simple: citric acid. Whilst this is not an ingredient you often find in home kitchens, it is a regular in restaurant kitchens, and I think it has lots of uses in our own home baking. The citric acid works brilliantly in this recipe, but I also use it to make a sour sugar coating for pâte de fruit, giving them sour gummy candy vibes. You can add it to a citrus buttercream to make it brighter and zingy, or any buttercream that just needs a little lift. It can be used to temper sweetness in a sorbet or added to candied orange to ensure they’re still bright and zesty. You also only ever need very small amounts of the stuff, so buying a single pack will last you a very long time. If you don’t want to buy any, don’t worry; I have also provided a recipe using only real citrus, which is still very good.