Why a Swiss Village Makes Halal Pastry By Juliane von Mittelstaedt

Walter Leisi is holding two rolled cylinders of dough in his hands, each wrapped in glossy foil, one labeled in French and the other in Arabic. Each package contains the same puff pastry, a concoction of 196 layers of flour, margarine, butter, water and salt -- the same, but for one difference, a tiny but decisive difference: one is preserved with alcohol and the other with potassium sorbate.

They taste the same, but they smell somewhat different. The dough preserved with potassium sorbate smells "slightly more cheesy," says Walter Leisi, 63, a jolly Swiss man wearing a purple short-sleeved shirt and a gold watch. Leisi is the director of a Nestlé plant in the Swiss town of Wangen bei Olten. He is also the inventor of Leisi-Quick, the world's first ready-made puff pastry, which is packaged on baking paper and sold in refrigerated, but not frozen, form and is thus ready for baking. The factory produces more than 41,000 tons of freshly made dough a year, an enormous quantity.

But in the case of Leisi-Quick, the real issue is not taste or smell, but God's will.