Imagine a world where pastry dough doesn't exist to make you doubt yourself. Where instead of being fragile and crumbly or sticky and mushy, it just rolls out good-naturedly like Play-Doh. Where you don't have to resort to food-science tricks (freeze the butter! add vodka! say your name backwards three times into a candlelit mirror!) to yield no-drama dough, but merely have to press the button on the food processor.
That, my friends, is cream cheese dough—a magical substance that not only is effortless to make and roll out, but bakes up into flaky, tender layers that you probably assumed only the very best, most intuitive bakers were capable of creating. (If you're like me, you probably swallowed the party line on pastry that says you need wafer-thin layers of butter in your dough to create flakiness. Cream cheese dough is here to prove you wrong on that score, too.)
Unlike many other pastry doughs, cream cheese dough doesn't usually include little visible pieces of solid fat that can make the dough tricky to handle. Instead, most recipes just call for dumping butter, cream cheese, salt, and flour into a food processor and blitzing it in pulses until it clumps up into a neat little ball. Once you dump it out on the counter, you canfeelthe difference, too. The dough is seductively soft, thanks to the generous amount of both butter and cream cheese. In fact, it's too soft to roll out right away, so most recipes include a chilling time that ranges from 30 minutes to an hour or two so that the dough firms up a bit. And that's it. No tricks, no hacks, no need for magical mystery pie hands.
So how does adding a substance that's usually served on a bagel create that flaky texture? The milk solids and stabilizers in cream cheese help prevent gluten from forming in the dough, and the rich combination of butter and cream cheese enhances its tenderness. The flakiness? Don't ask how it gets there. I just call it magic.
Not content with being exquisitely delicious and bafflingly easy, cream cheese dough happens to be exceptionally versatile, too. Like your favorite chambray shirt, cream cheese dough works with whatever you pair it with. That means it manages to be the perfect pastry to top yourpot pie. And also makes terrific empanadas.Rugelachandhamentaschen? Yes and yes.Apple tart,palmiercookies,quiche, fruitDanish—pretty much anything delicious and pastry-based you can think of.
And there's more. If you (or someone you love) likes to eat gluten-free, cream cheese dough can help. My colleague Anna Stockwell developed a brilliantly versatileGF CCD(that's "gluten-free cream cheese dough"). And thanks to the gums and stabilizers already in the cream cheese, you don't need to source any special food-science ingredients to make your GF dough taste like the wheat-based version.
But back to the OG CCD. There's only one thing that the classic formula can't pull off. If you want pie, you're going to have to use aslightly modified and fussier recipe,since the dough needs to bake up firmer and less tender and flaky. Yep, you read that right. Cream cheese dough is so tender and flaky thatsometimes it needs reining in.
But in every other circumstance, rejoice. Cream cheese dough is here to make one little corner of your world a little easier.
