When I wrote my first book, Dough, my aim was to show people that bread making is for everyone and should be fun, not daunting and complicated, which has been the previous experience of many people who come to my classes at the Bertinet Kitchen. Now this book aims to do the same for pastry, because I realize that people are often just as scared of making pastry as bread. There is an idea that some people are just naturally good pastry makers, or that you can only make great pastry if you have cold hands. I don’t believe that. Anyone can make fantastic pastry, and I will show you how.
Along the way, I will also talk you through resting and rolling pastry and blind baking. This last technique simply involves baking a pastry crust in the oven without a filling, but the idea seems to cause a lot of confusion. I am constantly asked: Why do you do it? How brown should the pastry be? If you bake it blind, then put in a filling and bake it for another half hour or so, will the pastry burn? How do you stop the pastry from cracking and shrinking in the oven? I will answer all these questions and many more.
One of the reasons that pastry making can seem challenging is that there are so many different names you are likely to come across, from pie pastry to tart-shell or cookie crust, puff, rough puff, pâte brisée, pâte feuilletée, flaky, choux, suet, and hot-water crust. My advice is not to worry about most of these. When you start baking at home, you don’t need to master a dozen different kinds of pastry in order to make beautiful pies and tarts to feed the family and impress your friends. Like anything you learn in life, it makes sense to get the basics right and build your confidence, then you can become more adventurous later on. So for this book I have narrowed everything down to just four main categories of pastry, and devoted a chapter to each type.
I call the principal ones simply “salted” and “sweet” because these are the names we used in the bakery where I did my apprenticeship in my native France: salé (meaning “salted”) for the savory pastry (not because it contains a lot of salt), and sucrée (literally “sugared”) for the sweet pastry. It was so direct. These are the all-purpose pastries that you can use for any pie or open tart, and they are made using the same method.
As I have said, I try to keep things simple, but in the Salted chapter, I have added a recipe for pork pies made with hot-water crust, which is a pastry used only for making raised pies, the kind you eat cold. I have included it because most people I know love pork pies but think they are tricky to make because traditionally they are “hand-raised,” that is, the pastry crust is formed by hand. My recipe is very straightforward and offers a much easier way of making the pies.
The fourth and fifth chapters are about pastries that are both light and airy but have different characteristics and involve two very different techniques. Puff pastry is all about rolling and folding to create layers with air trapped between them so that in the oven this air expands and the pastry literally puffs up (think of millefeuilles and vol-au-vents). By contrast, choux pastry, which is used for things such as profiteroles, involves making a “batter” with the texture of very thick custard. The moisture in the dough creates steam in the heat of the oven and puffs out the pastry, making it quite hollow and airy.
These four pastries are all you need to start to create a wealth of tarts and pies, and even cookies. And I also explain how to present and decorate fruit tarts in the artistic way that makes the displays in French bakeries look so stunning.
Just as Dough encouraged everyone to make bread making part of the routine of feeding family and friends, I hope that this book will do the same for pastry, and that by keeping things simple and starting from just four key recipes, you can relax, enjoy yourself, bake with confidence, and perhaps even show off a little bit.