Week 2: Basic Shortbread Tart Dough, Pâte Sablée

Last week, I started my Pâte Sablée tart dough adventures with some research into different recipes, and found that they generally fall into three categories: (1) high egg content, high sugar, (2) moderate egg content, low sugar, and (3) low/no egg content, moderate sugar. I tried out the high egg content, high sugar recipes last week only to find that they were a bust because of the metallic flavor of so many egg yolks. This week, I am going to dive into the moderate egg content, low sugar group of recipes and hopefully find some tasty options and interesting science!

Table 1: Normalized Recipes [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Note that 14 g is ~1 egg yolk.

Week 2: Moderate Egg Content, Low Sugar

Recipes 1, 2, and 3 all have one egg yolk and similar sugar content, so I am going to make the sugar content uniform, and let the amount of flour vary. Recipes 1 and 2 also have variable amounts of milk, which to me is a sign that the amount of flour being used isn't consistent from batch to batch, which could be due to not weighing ingredients. Since people generally tend to add extra flour when measuring with measuring cups, I am going to use the minimum amount of milk specified in my test recipes. Modified Recipes 1, 2, and 3 correspond to Splits D, E, and F in our tests:

Splits D and F differ very slightly in the flour to butter ratio. By weight, Split D has 34% butter and 46% flour, while Split F has 32% butter and 50% flour (note: all other ingredients vary by <1%). Split E substitutes some flour for almond flour and adds milk, which results in more flour overall in addition to extra liquid.

What I found was that Split D was slightly more tender and melted in the mouth a bit more than the higher flour-to-butter content Split F even though the percent change was small. This is likely because there is less flour and more butter available to coat the flour, which leads to less gluten development overall. Even with the almond flour, Split E is extremely tough. Not only does it have the highest flour-to-butter ratio, it also adds milk, which adds additional water and thus enables more gluten formation.

The flavors this week were all tasty, so we have some real contenders! Because it was the most tender, I'm going to take Split D as my reference to compare to the low/no egg content, moderate sugar recipes next week!

Split D wins this round!