Pate Sablee - Michel Roux Desserts Challenge Recipe 3

I am often inspired to bake more when I have more people to feed and as my parents came to stay for a couple of days I thought it was about time I dusted off my Michel Roux Desserts book and cracked on with my personal challenge of making every recipe in the book.  I’d already earmarked a chocolate and raspberry tart as a ‘must try this soon’ item so obviously it was essential that I went through the whole book, assessing every recipe before finally deciding on the one I’d already stuck a bookmark in.  Yeah I like to waste time that way.

Obviously with this being Michel Roux the instructions do not include laying your hands on a shop bought pastry case.  No no, you must make your own.  This is a first for me but come to think of it I’ve never bought a shop one either, I’ve simply never made a tart like this!  Honestly the more I bake these days the more I wonder if I’ve ever actually made anything other than sponge cakes.

Making paté sablée is one of those glorious recipes that makes a crazy mess of your kitchen.  Not only do you need to make your pastry on a nice clear work surface, said pastry recipe includes icing sugar, that well known coverer of all things within a half mile radius.  And egg yolk, minus the white.  Mmmm gooey separation with fingers, sticky.  I made a right royal mess doing this pastry and once everything was incorporated I was pretty sure my results were not as they should be.

Instead of a pliable ball of dough at a rollable consistency I had a sticky mess which just would not let go of my fingers.  (No pictures of this I’m afraid, I was too busy being covered in goo.)  I’m positive these recipes are rigorously tested before printing so either I did something wrong or pastry making is just one of those dark arts where you need to use a bit of judgement.  It’s not the most complicated of recipes and I followed it closely so my money’s on the dark arts option.

I figured that even after a spell in the fridge this pastry wasn’t going to be suitable for rolling so I added a little more flour and worked it into the dough.  It got a bit better but I still needed to add a bit more again.  I was worried about overdoing it so I only added enough to get the dough to a just combined consistency, also bearing in mind that when it did come time to roll it out I’d be flouring my work surface too.

Once the flour shenanigans were out of the way I wrapped my paté sablée in cling film and whacked it in the fridge to chill out.  Even though I wanted to use it for my tart straight away pastry isn’t fond of being too warm and the instructions definitely implied that overworking it would be bad bad bad.  A spell in the fridge was definitely in order to let it recover from my hot little hands.

And that’s it.  Paté sablée done and one chocolate and raspberry tart coming up in my next post.