rough puff pastry

Sorry in advance about the quality and quantity of the photos (or lack thereof) in this post and blog in general. In my defense, I was trying to do this in the middle of the night and am trying to save up for a decent camera.
Right then, the rough puff. It’s the less famous and glamorous brother to proper puff pastry that’s actually quite close to the real thing. There are less layers (243 instead of 729) and they come out less defined, but for the amount of time it saves, it puffs up beautifully and is great for almost everything you could use puff pastry for. It’s probably just the odd Mille-Feuille and a few others where you’d want maximum flakiness that it’s worth going through the time-consuming process. But if you haven’t got 3 hours, rough puff is every bit as buttery and versatile as its ‘official’ counterpart.
(Okay, it still takes a long time, but it eliminates the fear of butter poking through the pastry and it being too soft etc. If at any point the dough feels soft, not cold, or shrinking back I can just throw it in the fridge.)
It’s different to a laminated dough of a ‘real’ puff pastry in that instead of folding a block of butter (beurrage) into the dough proper (détrempe), you mix the butter straight into the flour and proceed with the folding. In other words, instead of thinning a single sheet of butter and folding it over itself time after time, you’re taking chunks of butter and thinning them while folding.
It starts with 4 simple ingredients: flour, butter, salt and water.

Rough puff pastry (makes enough for 4 tarts)
250g pastry flour (or plain/all-purpose, some even use bread flour to develop gluten)
250g cold but malleable unsalted butter
1/2 tsp fine salt
~100g ice cold water
With a pastry blender, fork or the tips of your fingers, rub in small chunks of the butter into the flour until starting to incorporate. You don’t want to go all the way to sandy breadcrumb-like texture, you want visible chunks of butter remaining