Dish · french
Mille-Feuille
Layers of crisp puff pastry stacked with pastry cream between them, topped with a flat glaze of icing, sometimes marbled with chocolate in a feathered pattern.
Where it comes from
French pastry chefs were making layered puff pastry desserts by the seventeenth century, and the name, meaning a thousand leaves, refers to the many thin layers created when butter and dough are folded repeatedly.
What cooks argue about
Cooks disagree on whether to dock and weigh down the pastry so it bakes flat, or let it puff freely, which looks dramatic but makes the cream slide and the layers hard to cut.
Nobody has published a mille-feuille recipe yet. The page stays out of search until one exists, which is the rule for every thin page here.