Sweet Pastry Dough (Pâte Sucrée: Part 1)

So I've got in my bowl my flour, butter, sugar, and salt, and you can see my sugar is a little bit on the brown side. I've used organic sugar, and I've used a lot more than what would normally go into a pie dough, so this is going to be a pate sucree. And I have here a pastry blender. The pastry blender is extremely sturdy. The tongs are not going to move anywhere, so they're really going to help me cut in the butter. And just like pie dough you want your pastry dough for your tart to also be a little bit on the flaky side rather than the mealy side. Now the sugar is going to create more of a mealy texture than you would normally have with a pie dough, but you still want to have a little bit of that flaky tenderness that you have with the characteristics of the pie dough. So I've got my butter in here which is very cold, and again if you want those nice flakes it's really important that your ingredients are cold.

Okay so we're cutting in the butter and just like with the pate brisee, which is the pie dough, we want to have varying sizes of butter, anywhere from a nickel to a dime. Pea size shapes are what you normally hear described and that's great too. But the most important thing is that your butter pieces are not all the same size.

So the difference between doing your tart dough by hand and your pie dough by hand is again the addition of egg. So I'm going to add my egg now, I'm going to beat it a little bit with my pastry blender just to kind of break up the yolk. And then I also have the addition of ice water. So I've added my egg first because your ice water is always going to vary. It's going to vary because of the moisture in the air and because of how your flour has absorbed some moisture, and then also because of the addition of egg. So I'm going to start with 3 tablespoons of water, plus we have our egg in there. And we'll mix that together and see how the dough's coming together. All right I do not need to add any more moisture to this dough so I'm going to pull it together with my hands, knead it for a second, and then we're going to wrap it and let it rest in the refrigerator for about 30-40 minutes before we roll it out.