Should butter for pie crust be cold?
When it comes to pie dough, keeping the butter as cold as possible is the key to achieving that gold-medal worthy flakiness. Once you've rolled out and folded your pie dough, those distinct bits of butter will steam as the dough bakes, creating the pockets of air that puff up into distinct layers.
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. With puff, cold butter provides the vital barrier and air pockets between the pastry that translates in eating terms into delicious flakiness.
Pastry must always be chilled in a fridge after making. This helps it to relax which in turn will help to prevent it shrinking on baking. Additionally, instead of trimming excess pastry from a tart case before baking blind you could also leave it overhanging the tin.
In biscuits, pie and pastry dough, butter is rubbed or cut into the flour. This causes the particles of flour to be coated in fat molecules, preventing excess liquid (like water or eggs) from absorbing into the flour, which creates an overdevelopment of gluten.
Chilling the ingredients prevents the butter from melting, which would allow the water in the butter to interact with the gluten in the flour, resulting in a less-flaky, more bread-like dough. The ideal temperature is usually “room temperature”—generally considered to be 68-72°F.
Cold butter is ideal for baked goods that should be crisp. Butter that's straight from the fridge doesn't get fully incorporated into a batter; instead it gets broken down into small pieces throughout your dough.
- Measure the ingredients carefully.
- Use good quality flour. ...
- Keep everything as cool as possible otherwise the fat may melt which would spoil the finished dish.
- Introduce as much air as possible during making.
- Allow to relax after making to allow the fat to harden.
- Handle the pastry as little as possible.
- Don't overwork the dough. Roll and handle shortcrust pastry as little as possible as overworking it can produce tough and unpleasant results.
- Use a metal tart tin. ...
- Don't stretch. ...
- Repair tears. ...
- Allow a little overhang. ...
- Rest. ...
- Bake it blind. ...
- Watch the colour.
No matter which fat you choose, if you're using lard, shortening, or butter, always cut it into small pieces and chill or even freeze it until very cold before you start making on the dough. This chilling step will make the dough easier to handle and help it become nice and flaky when baked.
But when choosing butter for baking, I always use unsalted, and we recommend you do, too. Salt acts as a preservative and masks any potentially funky flavors, so salted butter often sits on grocery store shelves longer than unsalted does. To ensure you're using fresh butter, choose unsalted.
Why do we need to keep the ingredients cold in making pastry?
Keeping the butter or shortening cold prevents it from mixing with the flour and sugar when he dough is rolled. Instead, the butter forms flat disk-like shapes suspended in the flour sugar mixture.
If you find that your baked goods that used baking powder are tasting strangely bitter, then there is an extremely good chance that you have put too much baking powder into the dish. The general rule of thumb is that you should be adding between one and two teaspoons of baking powder for each full cup of flour.
Here's the lowdown on pie crust. Flour, sugar, and salt are whisked together. Cold, cubed butter is added and broken down into the dry ingredients. Buttermilk is stirred in creating a shaggy but moist-ish dough.
If the butter chunks are too big, you'll have melted butter leaking from your pie crust as it bakes. If they are too small because they've been worked into the dough too much, you won't have as much air separating your layers, producing a more dense crust. Tip: Aim for chunks of butter the size of peas.
Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes, or up to overnight. Tip: Chilling hardens the fat in the dough, which will help the crust maintain its structure as it bakes. And the short rest before rolling relaxes the dough's gluten, helping prevent a tough crust.
Cover the pie dough with plastic wrap and chill at least 30 minutes before rolling it out. This lets the liquid absorb into the dough, firms the fat and allows the gluten to relax.
