A little late with our bake from the semi final of the bake off (seeing as the final has sadly been and gone already!) but these palmiers are worth the wait! We chose to fill ours with some parma ham, extra mature cheddar and wholegrain mustard!
So even though the final has actually happened, we’d like to take a moment to talk about the semi final, mostly as it gives us an excuse to talk about the delightful Selasi! It was unfortunately his time to leave the tent (sorry spoilers… but if you didn’t know that already where have you been?!) he’s been the most wonderful contestant and may not have won the bake off, but he definitely won our hearts…
Now back to the palmiers, week 9 was patisserie week (always a favourite of ours) and savoury palmiers were the signature challenge, and something we just couldn’t resist trying ourselves! Much to Paul’s dismay (we assume), we didn’t make our own pastry as we really really don’t have time for that, if you did want to give it a go though we have a recipe for it over on our arlettes post from last years bake off!
For filling a palmier it’s best not to go for anything too bulky as you want to be able to roll/fold the evenly and then when they’re lying flat baking, we don’t want any yummy filling leaking out of our pastry! Wholegrain mustard is something we love using as it really adds a nice depth of flavour to a lot of dishes and bakes, we used it a couple months ago in our roast chicken and leek gratin vol au vents. And then the cheese is just because cheese (the only reason you need).
So we’d seen a couple different ways of people folding and rolling their palmiers, we chose to stick to the traditional shape and folded the pastry twice before folding in half. But you can also fold once or roll each side into the middle, but we found our way super easy and gave a really nice shape once baked.
- 500g puff pastry
- 2-3 tbsp wholegrain mustard
- 5 slices parma ham
- 200g extra mature cheddar, grated
- Roll out the puff pastry into a large rectangle about 2-3mm thick.
- Spoon on the mustard and spread out evenly into a thin layer covering the surface of the pastry.
- Sprinkle over your grated cheddar and lay on your slices of parma ham so that they cover the length of the rectangle, don’t worry about it reaching the edges across the width.
- Fold over the edges down the length of the rectangle about 3/4cm, we used where our ham reached to as a guide for where to fold, we spread some more mustard and sprinkled a little parmesan on here but that is totally optional.
- Then fold the folded sections over again so that the 2 sides meet in the middle, then fold in half where they join, if you look at the pictures you should be able to see how we folded these.
- Slice into 1cm think pieces and lay on a lined baking sheet, spaced a few cm apart as these will spread as the pastry puffs out.
- Bake at 200C for 25 mins until they are an even golden brown colour, making sure that the pastry in the centre is well cooked so that they are nice crispy!
- Leave to cool (for at least 5 mins anyway…) and serve!
A reason to always bother baking the end cut offs with no filling… adorable heart shaped pastry!
