Sweet Short Dough Pastry Recipe

This shortcrust pastry is a light, sweet, crumbly dough used for making tarts and small pies. It's so easy to make: Beat the butter and sugar in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, then add eggs, then the flour. It's exactly like making cookie dough.

In fact, the dough itself is basically cookie dough. If you spooned it out onto a cookie sheet and baked it, you'd get shortbread cookies.

It helps to keep the butter cool—this prevents the gluten in the flour from developing too quickly, which would produce a chewy, rather than light and crumbly, pastry crust. The consistency you want is almost like a crumbly shortbread cookie.

Ingredients

13 1/4 ounces (375 grams) pastry flour, sifted

8 1/2 ounces (250 grams) unsalted butter

1/2 cup (95 grams) sugar

4 1/2 ounces (70 grams) egg, beaten

1/4 teaspoon salt