Want Perfect Pastry Dough? Cooking Teacher Shares Her Secrets (2024)

FAQs

What happens if you put too much water in pastry? ›

Richard's solution: The trouble with pastry is that you need to be accurate; too much water and you're left with shrunken, tough pastry, too little and it stays dry and crumbly. When adding the water to the butter and flour, use very cold water and add it a tablespoonful at a time.

Never roll out freshly made pastry because it will shrink when it's baked. Ideally refrigerate it overnight, or at least for a few hours. Once the tart tin is lined, place it in the freezer for another hour and blind bake from frozen. Don't over-work it or else it may become thick and crumbly.

Problem: Your Cooked Pastry is Tough

Why is your cooked pastry tough? This occurs when too little fat and too much liquid are added. Be careful not to overhandle the dough and to make sure the oven is hot.

The first golden rule of making pastry; keep the ingredients, the bowl and the hands as cool as possible.

Gluten is what makes bread soft and stretchy – it's desirable in bread, but not in pie dough. Rather, pie dough should be flaky and tender! So, it's important to use cold butter and ice water with your flour, as the coldness interrupts gluten development.

Egg yolks added to shortcrust pastry make it richer and slows down the development of the gluten in the flour, which is exactly what you want. Gluten has an elastic quality which can make pastry rubbery if overdeveloped. But the resulting crumbly dough can be difficult to work with.

Just sprinkle some cold water over the dough with your fingers and work it in—gently! —until the dough comes together. If your dough gets too warm, send it back into the fridge to chill out. When you take it back out, it should roll more easily.

The temperature for pastry is usually gas mark 5, 375 F (190 C), but you should always refer to the particular recipe.

Water, however, is absorbed much less easily into flour proteins when the temperature is colder. That's why purists recommend cold ingredients, cold equipment and marble boards. Keeping the butter cold also helps when making short crust pastry because it doesn't melt into the flour when you are working it in.

What not to do when making pastry? ›

If the dough is overworked, it can become tough and difficult to roll out. This can happen if the dough is kneaded too much or if too much flour is added during the rolling process. Shortcrust pastry can shrink during baking if it's not properly chilled beforehand or if it's rolled too thin.

Plain flours are best for pastry because their gluten strands are relaxed while the stronger gluten in bread flours can cause pastry to shrink back. Warm pastry cooked in an oven that was not pre-heated can collapse as its water evaporates before the pastry cooks and hardens.

Your dough can become sticky when you add too much water or the flour isn't suitable for the type of dough you are making. Over proofing or fermenting the dough can also result in the gluten structure weakening causing sticky dough.

Too much water when making a pie crust or any pastry for that matter, gives you a doughy / bready crust. For that flaky, melt in the mouth pastry, after incorporating the fat into the flour, just enough water (in teaspoons) to bring the dough just together is all that's needed.

That's right; All you have to do is pop your too-wet dough in the fridge and let it chill for a few hours. At that point, your pastry should be good to go — or, at least, better than it was.