Work on a clean and uncluttered counter. Doughs have a habit of taking more space than you think they might. Add the salt to the flour and the lemon juice to the water.

Place the flour on the counter, make a well in the center and add the diced butter. Work the butter into the flour by mashing the butter with a pastry blade, or between your thumb and forefinger. You can, simultaneously, work the butter and flour with the rest of your fingers. The goal is to make lima bean sized lumps of butter. Chunks of butter is necessary for the proper puffing of the dough.

Arrange the flour butter mix, which should resemble corn meal with butter chunks, into a pile and make a well in the center of that. Add about a third of the water, mix the outside edges of the pile of flour into the middle, mixing the flour mix into the water with your free hand. Push aside the middle to form another well, add the next third, repeat the process and add the last third of water.

The pastry will gather at the ends of your fingers like gluey flour. This can be unnerving, but it is unavoidable. Work the dough by kneading to form a cohesive ball which can be used to clean up all the stray bits of dough.

Use a bench scraper and clean the counter. Lightly flour the work space, place the dough into the middle of the counter, and roll into a rectangle, roughly three times as long as wide. Take care not to let the rolling pin to roll off the edge of the dough. Use your hands to keep the rectangle as uniform as possible and fold the pastry as a letter, the first third starts with the end nearest you and then fold the top portion over that. This is the first fold. Push your finger gently into the top to form a single divot. Some bakers prefer three folds, some prefer four. I use four folds. Place the dough on a sheet pan, cover with plastic wrap and cool for 20 minutes. Repeat this process two (or three) more times, each time pressing your fingers into the dough to reflect the number of folds it has received.

When you pastry is fully rolled and folded, cut them into portions of thirds. Each will be just shy of 1 pound. Wrap each piece well, place into a freezer quality zip top bag. Squeeze as much air out as possible and freeze. Use the dough within 1 month for best quality.

To roll the dough for use, remove the packet from the freezer and place in the refrigerator the night before to thaw slowly. It is important to keep the dough cold for as long as possible. A French pin is certainly useable for rolling puff, and that’s what I have. I do find these pins very helpful for large batches of dough or for ease. If you use a classic pin , it is important that it be a large pin so the handles keep your folded fingers from tearing the dough. Puff pastry dough which gets torn will pull and shrink in that spot and there is little that can be done to fix that. Here is a video showing some of the basics on pastry rolling.