You know that summer-in-the South feeling: It’s hot. You’re tired. You have a fridge full of delicious peak season fruits and vegetables, and you’ve planned a little dinner party with friends. You want to make something show-stopping but with very little effort.
Enter the little black dress of the pastry world: flaky tart dough, aka pâte brisée. She’s simple, and she goes with everything. She’s flaky, buttery and accessible to even the most novice and impatient bakers.
This little pastry number can be utilized in any season, but she is wonderful to have on hand during those lazy, hot days of summer. Think juicy blueberry galettes, savory tomato and feta crostadas, sumptuous peach turnovers, and maybe even a jam-filled hand pie. The options are endless with this versatile dough that you can batch up, make ahead, and keep in the freezer indefinitely.
Pâte brisée is also a helpful introduction to the techniques required for more advanced traditional French pastry. Cutting in cold butter, folding water into the cold buttery mass, and even that slight hint of lamination during rolling make this dough a cornerstone for many other classic French pastries, including puff pastry and the more intimidating laminated croissant dough.
The key to this dough is the temperature of the butter. Too warm, and it will yield a saggy, heavy tasting, greasy product. Too cold and it won’t properly bake into layers, denying us those nice flakes. Butter contains water,and when cut into flour at the right temperature, the dough expands in the oven, releasing a little steam that creates a slight rise while keeping the buttery flavor and texture intact.
Quality all-purpose flour such as King Arthur is best for this recipe. I always use a high-fat. European-style butter such as Plugra, which yields a smoother texture and superior flavor than lower-fat American butter. As I say at the bakery, you get out what you put in, so it’s always good to start with high-quality ingredients whenever possible.
Flaky Tart Dough
Fill the dough with your favorite sweet or savory prepared tart filling. A fruit filling can be as simple as berries or sliced fruit lightly macerated with granulated or brown sugar and citrus zest to taste.
Sarah Dodge is an Atlanta-based bread baker, pastry chef and baking instructor. She is the owner of Bread is Good, which offers bread subscriptions to the general public and wholesale baked goods to local markets and restaurants.
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