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.

Versions

Nobody has published a mille-feuille here yet. When somebody cooks one from a video and publishes it, their version appears in this list, with a link back to the original.

What goes in it

Each one opens everything else made with it.

Cook this next

French kitchen