Perfecting the Tart Crust

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With the right tart shell, pretty much anything brought home from the market can be turned into a simple but impressive main dish, a starter, or a dessert as shown in my collection of tart recipes. But I find myself fighting to find the right shell recipe of the right size for the tart pan I plan to use.

While the basics are always the same (see discussion of Escoffier below), each seems different and frankly, I would prefer to have a crust I am confident in and worry about the filling only. By trying several variations, I think I have accomplished my task of perfecting the tart crust.

I wanted to solve this once and for all with a good flexible recipe I can use for all occasions. I think I have nailed it — below are links to skip to the recipes for the perfect tart crust. To learn more about why — read on.

Let’s start with the basics.

An American version of Escoffier’s massive cookbook, Le guide culinaire gives his recipe for La Pate Ordinaire or Ordinary Short Paste.  Starting with a pound of flour he includes salt, cold water, and butter.  He also gives a recipe Pate a Foncer Fine or Fine Short paste.  Again, starting with a pound of flour (way more than we generally need), he adds sugar and an egg. 

Crème Fraiche?

Let’s start with the Escoffier pastes, compare it to others proposed, and determine if indeed this is an all-purpose solution. 

A word on technique. This is a food blog and an analytics blog.  I define analytics as adding specificity to the discussion.  In that regard, weights are more specific than volumes – especially when discussing flour.   For more rigor, I will be converting the measurements to grams to facilitate the analysis.  I also believe it is easier to cook in the metric system when possible. Frankly, it comes down to this.  If you don’t have a good food scale, get one.  It will improve your accuracy. It will cost you only a little bit more than the cost of ingredients of one failed tart.

The pound of flour translates to approximately 453g. Also note we are assuming 56g as the weight of a large egg (an average US large egg). This may vary for you depending on where you are in the world. Please see this reference guide on egg sizes.

Takeaway

• The Fine Short Paste intended for a dessert pastry has the egg and sugar where the ordinary does not, furthermore it has more butter.

A Reference Tart from Dorie Greenspan

— Pretty close to perfection

Takeaways

• Since both the Escoffier Fine Short and the Greenspan recipe call for one egg for a pound of flour, and Greenspan uses one for roughly a third of that amount, it has effectively more egg.
• The required butter of the Greenspan recipe is right between the two Escoffier recipes

Aaron Hyman’s Tart Shell

–– Different approach to a similar end

Promoted by Samin Nosrat as a perfect all-purpose crust, Aaron Hyman’s tart shell uses crème fraiche or plain cream. For taste reasons, I prefer the crème fraiche to the plain cream. A quick analysis will show that this tart shell is very similar. (Note: Nosrat lists the dough as Aaron’s Tart Dough, we will use that name in the following.)

The flour required for the pastry is scaled as before and all other ingredients likewise to produce a 9.5 inch tart shell.

Takeaways

• Aaron’s alternate tart shell recipe has almost the same about of butter as the Greenspan reference shell.
• In reality the difference between the two recipes is that egg is being replaced with crème fraiche.
• The Aaron tart has the highest amount of sugar — dessert shell level.

Egg or Crème Fraiche?

What is the impact of replacing the egg with cream? Is it reasonable to consider that this proposed recipe is not much different. Or to be very specific; eggs, cream, and butter all introduce dairy fat and water to recipes along with a small amount of solids. So, if we estimate the dairy fat and the water in those three ingredients and compare what do we get?

The above graph is reproduced with the additional calculated total water and calculated dairy fat from all sources.

Takeaways

• As suspected accounting for the three sources of dairy fat, Aaron’s dough appears to be relatively close to the Escoffier: Fine Short Paste (the desert shell). Both have about 95g of dairy fat.
• Aaron’s dough is the sweetest of the three doughs that contain sugar.

In reality, it appears Aaron dough is pretty much a desert dough.

Conclusion — How do they taste?

How do they taste? Could either be used in place of each other? Although similar in makeup, the answer is a flat no. Simply, the taste of Aaron’s dough is not there to stand up to the strength of the mustard, leeks, and the eggs of the Mustard Tart pictured above. But it does have some promise.

Tasting results

• Aesthetically, the egg in the Greenspan tart gives a nice rich golden color, the taste richer. However, the egg gives a crispy almost burnt taste.
• In Aaron’s tart dough the crème fraiche gave a desirable tartness and a moister product. However, the richness in taste provided by the egg was missing.

While the two doughs are not interchangeable, it is possible the two together are even more desirable. Additionally, while hard if not impossible to scale a recipe with eggs (2/3 an egg for example), adding an appropriate amount of crème fraiche instead solves that problem.

Recommendation — Combine the two

The texture added by the crème fraiche really improves the taste and feel. While still flaky, we avoid the slightly burnt taste. However, the flavor of the egg is clearly missing. Therefore, the obvious answer is to combine the two. Furthermore based on the analysis above we can add eggs and crème fraiche in amounts to balance the fat and other components to whatever size we need. If we need a bigger tart shell we can work with the whole units of eggs and of course any measurement of crème fraiche we desire.

The perfect tart in two sizes

To produce two 9″ tart shells increasing the flour and the creme fraiche and proportionally. This gives a very similar result with still only one egg. For detailed hints please review this posting about the perfect savory tart.

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