Easy Tart Crust Recipe

Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making a crisp and buttery tart crust. So let's get started. Tarts are one of the main categories of desserts, but they can feel very intimidating. This video will show you how to make the perfect tart crust with a lovely short texture, and it's perfectly sweet. It's good for all kinds of tarts, and once you've mastered this recipe, you will have so many different things at your fingertips, and you can really improvise with the fillings. First off, let's measure the flour out. I want one and a half cups or 180 grams of all-purpose flour. Very important not to use too much, or your tart crust will not be nice. Scale is the best way. If you're using a measuring cup, fluff the flour up and sprinkle it in. Never scoop. Perfect. To this mixture, I'm adding a quarter cup or 50 grams of granulated sugar. The sugar will caramelize when we bake it, giving us a more golden tart crust. It's also gonna soften the dough up so it has a nice, short, crisp texture. And, of course, it's sweetening things up, too. For some contrast, you can add a quarter teaspoon of salt. Grab a whisk and give it a good mix. You have two choices for this recipe today. You can make this by hand or pull your food processor out and whiz it up. I'm gonna do this by hand just because I feel most of us wouldn't want to grab a big appliance and have to clean up afterwards. It's really simple and quite fun to do this with your hands. Scale is done. Now, we can grab half a cup or 113 grams of nice, cold butter. You can use regular American-style butter or European-style if you prefer. Both work well. If you're doing this by hand, though, and your hands are maybe a little arthritic or tired, the European butter is gonna be softer and easier to work in. Cut this up into small pieces. Tart crust dough is also known as pâte sucrée. It's a magical, beautiful shell that is so satisfying and buttery, crisp, and pairs well with tons of different fillings. Today, I'm gonna show you how to make the dough, shape it, and bake it up. You can fill it with any number of delicious things, though. My butter is nice and diced up, so add that in. And with your clean hands or a pastry blender, you're gonna work this into small pieces. If you're using a food processor, you would have all the dry ingredients whizzed up in your processor. Pop your butter in and just whiz a couple of times until you have smaller pieces, kind of like a sandy mixture almost. Work that butter in. Right now, I'm pinching the butter up and just working it into smaller pieces. My goal here is to have kind of a coarse breadcrumb mixture, and that's the same if you're doing this by hand with a pastry blender or in your food processor. Hunt and peck around for any larger pieces of butter lurking about. If you're wondering what this tastes like, it's almost like a shortbread cookie with just a little more structure. Shortbread would be kind of like just this pressed into a cookie, but here we're gonna use one egg to give us just enough structure to hold things together. Beautiful breadcrumb-y mixture up. It's okay if there's a few pieces of larger butter hanging out because we will be mixing this more. Set this aside for just a moment and grab a small bowl. One large egg, cracked right into that bowl, along with half a teaspoon of vanilla. Just a little bit for some flavor. Now we can whisk this up. Drizzle this into your flour mixture. And by the way, if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button. There's two new recipes every week. Now we can work this together. I'm using a spatula. You could use your hands. Right now my goal is just to have a shaggy mixture, which is mostly combined, but we're not done yet. And once you get to that step, we can turn this out onto the counter and complete the mixing process. A light sprinkle of flour for our countertop. And you can see the texture right here. It's like, it's so close to coming together. Onto the countertop. This shaggy mixture needs to get kneaded and pressed together three to five times until it comes together in a ball that we can chill. This dough will give you the most beautiful shell for a French fruit tart, filled with, could be custard or a cream cheese mixture, topped with fruit. It could be a lovely chocolate tart, filled with ganache, dulce de leche, caramel. The list goes on. With just a little bit of work, this is a nice cohesive ball. So, grab a length of plastic wrap. Scoop it up. Flatten this into a disc. This is your head start because, of course, we're gonna roll this out, so you don't wanna have a giant ball. It should be a flatter disc that will chill more quickly and be easier to handle. We're gonna refrigerate this for at least one hour, or it could go into the freezer for 30 minutes if you're in a rush. If you wanna make this in advance, and by the way, you could double this recipe or triple it and have three tart shells ready to be made, you can freeze this for up to three months, or it could be in the refrigerator for up to three days. We're gonna chill this up and be back with the magic of editing. After chilling, lightly flour your work surface. I'm using a pastry mat today. This is a silicone coated mat. It is a really good investment for the kitchen. If you're making things on a hot day, or you overworked a dough, or you have hot hands, and things are just getting too warm and messy, lift the whole thing up, bring it to the fridge, chill for a few minutes, and bring it back. It's also almost impossible for things to stick to this, and you can use gravity to help things come off. Unwrap your chilled dough. You'll probably have to take this out of the fridge and let it sit on the countertop for five to 10 minutes, because if it's too cold, it'll crack. So chilled, but rewarmed just a little bit. A little more flour for the top. We're gonna roll this out into an 11 inch circle that's about an eighth of an inch thick. See, a little cracking here is fine, but too much is a bad thing. And you'll wanna keep your pastry dough moving, and re-flour as needed. This makes a really beautiful and impressive tart shell. So I'm gonna show you two ways that you can make this. One, with a traditional fluted tart tin with a removable base, and with our special tart rings. So for example, this is a little sticky. Gravity assist. Continue rolling that out. Here we have our 11 inch disc. So you have two choices. You can fold this into quarters, or you can roll it onto your pin. It's whatever you feel more comfortable with. That's how easy that is with a pastry mat. Okay, center this up and transfer your dough. And here, you're gonna want to lift and press down. So lift the dough and press it in. And sometimes when we're moving cameras and getting things set up, things sit out for a bit. So this is very soft right now. It's so soft that if you were making this at home, I would tell you to pop it back into the fridge for a minute. But I'm gonna use all of my powers, given to me by Virgo, and make this work. So I've pressed down, and now I can just press the side. Right now, the dough is so delicate, but once it comes out of the oven, it'll be nice and crisp. Okay, now you can grab a knife and trim the excess. So you want to bring the knife towards you. Or maybe you said better, you want to bring the knife towards the edge of your tin. You can also use your finger, just like that. One of the things that annoys every baker is that this has a tendency to do some shrinking, and it'll shrink down. So you don't mind having a little bit of a lip. It's time to do a final inspection. If you see any spots that are thinner than they should be, you can pop in a little bit more of the dough. This spot right here is a little thin. So just take a bit of dough and press that in. This looks great, but if you popped this into the oven now, it would melt into a puddle, not acceptable. So we're going to chill this one hour in the refrigerator or 30 minutes in the freezer minimum. You can freeze this for much longer, clearly, or have it in the fridge for a few hours to really set up. I'm gonna pop this in now, but in the meantime, we're gonna re-roll this out and make a little mini tart with a different method. While this chills, preheat your oven to 375 so it's hot and ready to bake. I have my scraps, and I think it's just enough to make one other tart. So press that together. You should chill this up, that's the best practice. Roll this out again, being very gentle since this is so soft. If you've ever wanted to make the fanciest looking French tarts, you'll need these tart rings. I've seen people use these on GBBO lately. They're from De Buyer, they're pricey, but they're the only tool that works. So these have perforated edges, and you will bake this on a perforated silicone mat. Basically you want air to flow. So this goes here, they're made by a company called De Buyer. And I'm gonna punch one out. And now we can cut some strips of dough. And this goes on the inside of your ring. I went through a super fancy dessert phase before I had kids. So I would take this dough, I would make it in different colors, cut strips of it, laminate it together so it was striped, and then have these beautiful striped tarts I would make for friends and for Instagram as well. Okay, so now this basic form is here. You wanna press. Press towards the edge, just like that. And then use a small knife and trim the excess off. Just like this. You'd repeat that process with more rings. So basically if you're using these rings, you need a lot of them if you wanna make more than one or two tarts. And this goes into the freezer. I like to freeze mine solid, so more like an hour as opposed to 30 minutes. And then we'll bake this off again as well. You'll see what they look like, and the goal is to have a perfect, precise, ultra crisp tart shell. Okay, these can go into the freezer now. Once your dough has been frozen or chilled, you're gonna pierce the bottom just to let air escape. Steam is your enemy here. Place some parchment over the top and add some pie weights. This will hold the top down and prevent it from bubbling up. Our fancy ones don't need that. Air escapes through the perforations in the metal as well as the silicone mat. Our little tarts we'll bake at 350 for 12 to 15. Our more traditional tart we'll bake at a higher temperature and you have a couple options here. You can par bake this for fillings, like maybe a lemon curd that needs to be baked in here, or you can fully bake it for fillings that are not baked, like a ganache, cream cheese filling, or a vanilla pastry cream. For par baking, you're gonna bake this at 375 for 12 minutes and then remove the paper and the weights and bake for an additional eight to 10 minutes. The crust should look dry and lightly golden. If you're fully baking the crust, 375 for 12 minutes, remove the weights and the paper and then bake for 14 to 16 minutes and the tart will appear a beautiful golden color. Today I'm baking mine all the way through because I'm using a no bake cream cheese filling. In you go. Out of the oven and cool enough to touch, I have some beautiful little tarts. So these are the ones with my tart rings. You can see the bottom, nicely browned. If you wanted to, you could cook them longer so the side takes on more color. And for the big guy, lovely tart. Thin, but it's strong enough to hold itself together. With the tart rings, these took 18 minutes to take on this much color. I suggest checking them starting at 15 minutes and you can see how much color you'd like. You can fill your tart shell now and enjoy, or this is good for up to two days at room temperature, just have it covered, or three months if frozen. These tarts can be filled however you'd like. I have some ganache for my small ones, topped with raspberries, and for my larger tarts, I have an easy cream cheese filling. Perfect for some berries. Doesn't have to look perfect to be delicious. And just like that, your tarts, however you chose to fill them, are ready to enjoy. Crisp as can be, perfectly sweet, and just plain delicious. I hope you get a chance to make this recipe and do something really creative with it. And if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button and check out my pastry playlist.