Why It's Special

• Puff pastry is made with the same basic ingredients as a homemade pie crust -- flour, water, salt, butter -- but the end result is vastly different, because of the unusual technique that's used. Conventional pie crust mixes the fat and flour together, creating a meltingly flaky dough. Puff pastry uses a relatively tough flour-and-water dough, wrapped around a large quantity of butter. As the dough is rolled and folded, the dough and its trapped butter form hundreds of individual layers of pastry, separated and waterproofed by the butter. When it's baked, steam from the dough lifts those hundreds of layers and makes a remarkably light, crispy, flaky pastry.

Keeping Your Cool

• For puff pastry to retain its shape and its ability to puff, it must always be kept cool. When it warms, the butter softens and can easily be absorbed into the dough instead of keeping the layers separate as it should. On a more immediate level, it becomes difficult to work with and won't hold its shape. If you've prepared a dish with puff pastry, or a number of individual smaller pastries, they must be kept cold until they're ready to go into the oven. Clear enough refrigerator space to hold your food before you start. Stackable containers lined with parchment or wax paper can help you maximize your storage capacity.

The Catch

• One potential downside to this approach is that some fillings don't lend themselves to waiting. Any filling that's still warm must be baked immediately, or it will make your pastry soggy. You can counter that by chilling the filling before you use it, but others aren't as easily fixed. Wet fillings -- such as custards, meats in sauce and fresh or frozen fruit with its natural juices -- can quickly make the pastry soggy if they're stored for any length of time. For those fillings, freezing is a better option.

Frozen in Time

• Puff pastry can go straight from your freezer to the oven, and if anything, it bakes better when it's frozen. This frees up space in your refrigerator and simplifies your planning by helping you work further in advance. Bear in mind that the frozen pastry is fragile, so it should be packed into rigid freezer containers rather than bags. The containers will protect against accidental damage while your pastries are in storage. Freezing is especially useful for pastries with wet fillings, which won't thaw until the puff is largely baked. Even for less-problematic pastries, preparing your foods ahead of time and freezing them is a convenient option to exploit whenever it's useful.