The Basic French Dough I Use to Make All My Tarts

My go-to pastry dough is pâte sablée, a candy, cookie-like dough that may be baked right into a tart shell or sliced and baked as cookies. Sablé, which suggests “sand” or “sandy” in French, refers back to the dough’s crumbly texture when baked; it’s certainly one of a number of important French tart doughs, together with pâte brisée and pâte sucrée. Like pâte sucrée, pâte sablée is a flexible dough consisting of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. Sablée recipes, nevertheless, often name for powdered sugar as an alternative of granulated or caster sugar, giving the dough a extra tender, crumbly texture than its sucrée and brisée counterparts. My love of pâte sablée is all about the truth that it is essentially the most like a cookie of all the traditional French doughs—this makes it good for desserts like a lemon tart or contemporary fruit tart, during which you desire a candy, brief crust. 

Whereas it is extremely scrumptious, delicate pâte sablée can be barely extra finicky than its pastry siblings. Some recipes have cooks incorporate only a single yolk, however I discover that these doughs are harder to work with and disintegrate simply. So in my recipe under, I incorporate a complete egg: The proteins within the egg whites present construction, making the dough simpler to work with, whereas the fats within the yolks give the dough extra richness. A contact of almond flour provides a nutty notice, whereas additionally giving the dough a satisfying crispness after it’s been baked. 

A tart shell comprised of pâte sablée is great with fruit or frangipane, and you too can use the dough as the bottom to make intricate layered French desserts referred to as entremet. Sablée additionally makes an awesome cookie: I often use it to make slice-and-bake sablés hollandaise (chocolate-and-vanilla checkerboard cookies) and I additionally typically put the dough in a piping bag to create ornamental swirled cookies. Listed here are my tips about methods to make a pâte sablée for pâtisserie-worthy desserts at dwelling.

Key Strategies for Making Pâte Sablée

Sablage. On this recipe, you will use your fingertips to rub chilly butter into flour, confectioners’ sugar, and floor almonds to create a sandy dough. This conventional French pastry approach—referred to as sablage—helps coat the flour in fats to inhibit gluten growth, leading to a crumbly (in a great way!), tender crust. Some sablée recipes name for creaming softened butter with sugar in a stand mixer, however I reserve that method for sablé à la poche—piped sablé cookies—which require a mushy, pipeable dough. Creaming very mushy butter is good when you want a dough mushy sufficient to pipe, however makes much less sense if you plan on rolling it out between parchment earlier than chilling it, because it’ll take for much longer to agency up once more.

Fraisage. The opposite important French approach on this dough is fraisage, which entails utilizing the heel of your hand to smear the dough towards a piece floor. This helps evenly mix the butter, egg, and dry components, and in addition distributes fats and moisture for a brief, crumbly dough.  

Resting the dough. Resting and chilling the dough at numerous factors all through the method helps the gluten chill out and retains the butter chilly, leading to a young crust that holds its form when baking. 

Roll the dough between parchment. Sablée is delicate and barely sticky, with an inclination to interrupt or tear when manipulated. Rolling the pastry between two sheets of parchment makes it simpler to position in a tart pan: After the rolled dough has chilled and firmed up, you’ll peel away away one facet of the parchment, invert the dough onto the tart pan, then rapidly and gently use your fingers to press the dough into the tin’s crevices. For simple shaping, roll the dough one to 2 inches bigger than your tart pan, then use a pointy paring knife to trim away the surplus after you’ve formed and chilled the dough within the tart pan.

Take note of the dough’s temperature. If the rolled dough is just too heat, it can keep on with the parchment. If it is too chilly, it can tear if you place it within the pan. Goal for one thing in between—it needs to be agency and chilly sufficient to peel the parchment away simply, but malleable sufficient to press into the pan with out tearing or breaking. When unsure, chill the dough till agency, then let it sit at room temperature for 3 to 5 minutes to let it soften ever so barely earlier than inverting it into the tart pan. In case you’ve chilled the dough in a single day, let it sit at room temperature for 10 minutes earlier than flipping it onto the pan.

Use a tart pan with a detachable backside—then grease and flour it nicely. A tart pan with a detachable backside makes it a lot simpler to carry the baked and cooled tart shell from the pan. I like to recommend lining the underside of the tart pan with parchment, then coating it with nonstick spray and dusting it flippantly with flour. In case you’re utilizing a hoop or pan with flat sides (versus fluted), you’ll be able to line each the underside and the edges with parchment strips as an alternative of greasing and flouring it. 

There’s no have to weigh the pastry down when par-baking. To make sure that tart shells can face up to moist fillings like mousses or custards, pastry cooks usually bake the shell earlier than filling them. Usually, they line the shells with parchment paper, then crush the crust with dried beans, raw rice, or pie weights, which prevents it from shrinking because it bakes. In my testing, nevertheless, I discovered that pâte sablée tarts baked with out weights had been simply as—if not much more—clean, evenly baked, and visually interesting as these baked with weights.   

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