Why puff pastry and not shortcrust?

What is shortcrust pastry?

Shortcrust pastry is flour with fat rubbed into it, bound with a little cold water. The fat coats the flour and “shortens” the gluten, which is where the name comes from, so the baked crust is tender and crumbly rather than chewy. It is sturdy, it does not mind a wet filling, and it holds its shape in a deep tin. That is why it is the default for most British-style meat pies, and for a great many Singapore bakery pies too. If you want to see where the Singapore bakery pie sits among British steak pies, Australian meat pies and American pot pies, there is a wider guide to pie types on Pie Singapore; this page sticks to the one difference that defined Oven Marvel.

What is puff pastry?

Puff pastry is a laminated dough. A block of cold butter is wrapped in a simple flour-and-water dough, then rolled and folded again and again until there are hundreds of alternating sheets of dough and butter. In a hot oven the water in the butter turns to steam and pushes the dough sheets apart, and the butter fries them crisp. The result rises, flakes and shatters.

The counter below shows the arithmetic, which is the clearest way to see why puff pastry behaves so differently from shortcrust.

The lamination counter

Puff pastry rises because thin sheets of butter separate thin sheets of dough. Each fold multiplies the butter sheets. Pick a fold and a number of turns and the counter does the arithmetic.

Fold type

Letter fold (in thirds, multiplies by 3) Book fold (in quarters, multiplies by 4)

Number of turns:

4

My rough puffClassic puff

1 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 81 butter sheets

Butter sheets

81

Dough sheets

82

Layers in total

163

Four letter folds: the rough puff in my recreations. Real rough puff has butter in flattened lumps, not a perfect sheet, so treat this number as a ceiling.

cross-section, not to scale

Worked examples (start with one butter block wrapped in dough)

Folding	Arithmetic	Butter sheets	Total layers
Croissant dough, three letter folds	1 × 3 × 3 × 3	27	55
My rough puff, four letter folds	1 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3	81	163
Two book folds then one letter fold	1 × 4 × 4 × 3	48	97
Classic puff pastry, six letter folds	1 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3	729	1,459
Four book folds	1 × 4 × 4 × 4 × 4	256	513

Why dough sheets are one more than butter sheets: when you fold, the dough on the outside of one layer presses against the dough of the next and they fuse, so every butter sheet ends up with dough on both sides and nothing else. That is the same reason six letter folds are usually quoted as 729 butter layers and not 1,458.

What did Oven Marvel use?

Oven Marvel used puff pastry, made in the shop, with butter (ieatishootipost, 2013). Every detailed review agrees. The pie had a sheet of it on the bottom and another on top, and was baked flat. Reviewers who tried to describe it reached for contrasts: light rather than heavy, crisp on top and chewy inside (SETHLUI.com, 2020), not overly flaky but buttery (ieatishootipost, 2009). Several pointedly compare it with the shortcrust, British-style pie they expected.

The butter is the second half of the story. Leslie Tay noticed that the pastry smelled of butter rather than margarine (ieatishootipost, 2013). Many bakeries use margarine or a pastry shortening for puff, for very practical reasons: they stay pliable in a warm room and they melt at a higher temperature, so the layers survive a hot kitchen. All-butter puff is more fragile and much more delicious.

How do the two pastries compare?

Why would a pie shop choose puff?

Nobody recorded Chef Johnny Ngiam’s reasoning, so what follows is my inference, labelled as such.

Because he was a pastry chef. His career was in hotel pastry (ieatishootipost, 2013), where laminated doughs are daily work. Making puff pastry by hand is a skill most bakeries buy their way around. A chef who has it tends to use it.

Because a flat pie is mostly pastry. A tall pie is a container for filling. A flat pie is closer to a filled pastry, where the crust is the point and the filling is the seasoning. The proportions of Oven Marvel’s pie, often criticised as too flat (Miss Tam Chiak, 2019), make most sense if the pastry was what the shop was proudest of.

Because puff carries a peppery cream sauce well. The soaked inner layers that reviewers mention, the chewy bit just above the filling (ieatishootipost, 2009), only happen with laminated pastry. Shortcrust would simply go soft.

Were other Singapore pies made with puff pastry?

Some, yes, which is why “old school” is a slippery label. Leslie Tay remembered the neighbourhood bakery chicken pies of the 1970s and 1980s as shaped like big muffins with a domed top and made with puff pastry (ieatishootipost, 2009). That is one person’s memory, not a survey. Hotel coffee houses have long made butter puff chicken pies: a Hainanese pastry chef at M Hotel told Hong Leong’s Hi-Life magazine that he chills his shaped pies at 1 to 3 C for about two hours before baking, because butter melts in Singapore heat (Hong Leong Hi-Life magazine, 2018). And chain bakeries describe their own crusts in their own words; Polar, for instance, calls its chicken pie crust buttery, golden and tender-flaky (Polar Puffs & Cakes).

What made Oven Marvel unusual was not puff pastry alone. It was all-butter puff, made by hand, in a tiny takeaway shop, in a flat pie, at a price that ended at S$4.

Can I use shop-bought puff pastry instead?

Yes, if you choose carefully. Look for all-butter puff, because the flavour difference is exactly the one Leslie Tay noticed. I have written a whole weeknight recipe built on bought puff, and it gets surprisingly close. For the full experience, make rough puff pastry and read laminating puff pastry in Singapore heat first; the other technique guides for butter puff chicken pies cover the filling and the reheat. The equal-weight rough puff method I use borrows its shape from a Singapore home baker’s Eurasian chicken pie recipe (Singapore Noodles), adjusted for a flat pie.