Week 6: Basic Shortbread Tart Dough, Pâte Sablée

Week 6: How low can we go?

Last week, we honed in on the techniques that help make tart dough tender. This week, I want to lower the flour-to-butter ratio of our current reference, Split M, to see what it does. If I were to only lower the flour content, the percent sugar in the recipe would increase. To avoid competing effects, I need to slightly adjust the sugar content as I lower the flour to keep it at the same percentage in the total recipe. Ideally, you would do this with every ingredient in the recipe, but we will have to get away with only adjusting the sugar since all the other ingredient amounts are so small that they vary by <0.2%. This means their their adjustments would be less than a gram, which is the resolution of my kitchen scale. Let's lower the flour in 10 g increments going down to 120 g, which was the lowest flour content recipe, Split G, which had no eggs. Our splits are thus:

As you would expect, lowering the flour content made of a much stickier dough. By the time I got to 120 g of flour, I had to work quickly before the dough liquified. However, there was very little difference in the baked result. The splits were essentially indistinguishable. While the doughs were all rolled to the same thickness, slight variations in the doneness and thicknesses mattered far more than the split. A thicker shell will be more tender. Usually in tarts you want a thin shell, but if you are making a Pâte Sablée dough, you'll want to consider making it slightly thicker for the added tenderness. Additionally, the most tender shells have very little color, so baking only until the edges start to brown is important. This seems to indicate that the reduction in the flour-to-butter ratio resulting in a more tender tart shell in Week 2 only helps to a certain point or that it does not actually help at all and there was some unanticipated variation in the bake in that week.

Left to right: Splits M, O, and P

There was slightly more browning as the flour-to-butter ratio decreased due to the increase in the percentage of butter. As the amount of butter increased, more butter leaked out during baking. At 120 g of flour, significantly more butter leaked out, so that seems to be about as far as you'd want to push things. Given that there was very little difference, I would go with 150 g of flour since it is a much easier dough to work with. Knowing that we can go down to 130 g of flour with little effect could be really useful if we wanted to substitute some of our flour for a dry ingredient for flavor while keeping roughly the same dough hydration, like nut flour, cocoa powder, or matcha. So we will stay with Split M as our reference and play with the amount of gluten in the flour itself next week.