Pâte Sucrée Tart Crust Dough CI
http://www.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/8114-french-apple-tart
Ingredients
- 1 1/3 cups (6 2/3 ounces) all-purpose flour
- 5 tablespoons (2 1/4 ounces) sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 10 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Preparation
Step 1
1. FOR THE CRUST: Adjust 1 oven rack to lowest position and second rack 5 to 6 inches from broiler element. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Whisk flour, sugar, and salt together in bowl. Add melted butter and stir with wooden spoon until dough forms. Using your hands, press two-thirds of dough into bottom of 9-inch tart pan with removable bottom. Press remaining dough into fluted sides of pan. Press and smooth dough with your hands to even thickness. Place pan on wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet and bake on lowest rack, until crust is deep golden brown and firm to touch, 30 to 35 minutes, rotating pan halfway through baking. Set aside until ready to fill.
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FOR THE EASIEST-EVER TART DOUGH, MELT THE BUTTER
Traditional French pastry crusts that call for cold butter require a series of chilling, resting, and rolling steps to ensure that the dough doesn’t shrink or slump during baking. For our modified pâte sucrée, we use melted butter, which allows us to skip the fussy prebaking steps—and offers a couple of other benefits, too.
First, melted butter thoroughly coats the flour proteins, preventing them from linking up and forming the elastic network known as gluten that causes dough to retract during baking. The fat also “waterproofs” the dough by coating the flour’s starch granules, preventing them from absorbing moisture from the tart filling. Finally, melted butter makes this dough not only easy to throw together—just pour the butter over the dry ingredients and stir—but also so malleable when raw that it can simply be pressed into the pan rather than rolled out. Best of all: This dough will work for any sweet tart recipe.
DOUGH IN SECONDS: Pour melted butter over the flour mixture and stir.
CRUST IN A MINUTE: Just press it into the pan—no rolling necessary.