How to make puff pastry dough (the easy way)

I love puff pastry, and it makes a lot of baking projects more delicious and glorious. But most people view it either as something to be purchased from an expensive store, or something that takes monumental effort and talent. This recipe, adapted from River Cottage Every Day, proves that to be wrong! This takes about 15 minutes to prepare, and then rests for (at least) 30 minutes, giving you easy puff pastry dough in well under an hour. Pretty awesome. Use this dough for french fruit tarts (entry forthcoming), pasties (where this recipe first appeared on this blog), as a pot pie topper, or any of a thousand other excellent ideas. 

Puff pastry 
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon  salt
2/3 cup butter, chilled and chopped into small cubes
ice water

Procedure
Sift the flour and salt together in a large bowl. Throw in the cold chopped up butter and toss until all the butter chunks are covered with flour. You can use a pastry cutter if you want, but if you do, make sure you don't over-chop the butter. This is important if you want that delicious flakiness in the pastry! The butter cubes shouldn't be smaller than 1 cubic cm (not that I measured). Definitely don't use a food processor---I've made that mistake.

Add the water a couple of tablespoons at a time, mixing it in with a wooden spoon, until you have just enough liquid to make a firm dough. The butter is still in chunks at this point.

Shape the dough roughly into a rectangular prism with your hands and put it on a well-floured surface. Flour a rolling pin and roll the dough out in just one direction (away from you is easiest) until it makes a long, flat rectangle -- about 1/4" thick. Fold the top third down and the bottom third up over that (like a letter) so that you have a rectangle that's three layers thick. Rotate 90 degrees and repeat the process. Roll out, fold, and rotate a total of six times. Then cover the dough with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to rest for at least 30 minutes. You can also freeze it, and it should keep for a good long while.