At Yunkle & Oaf we love to try new recipes and adapt old ones too. This is so that not only we can enjoy awesome food but our clients can as well. Being Caterers it is important to us that we can always offer our clients the most tasty and innovative dishes!
How to make perfect flakey pastry
I am not a pastry chef, in fact I'm not a chef at all.
But like everyone I love pastry. I think people get scared of making pastry from scratch because you can buy good frozen pastry, however, pastry is actually simple and easy and pretty quick and of course always tastes better made from scratch.
I'm going to make chocolate mousse tarts today, iv'e had my eye on these for a while, I love chocolate mousse, it reminds me of my dad. He loves choc mousse. Actually, my dad loves anything chocolate.
So in terms of pastry I always use the same recipe. It comes from the 'Bourke Street Bakery' recipe book. A bakery in Sydney which i'll admit iv'e never been to.
I've made the savoury shortcrust pastry a lot more than the sweet but i'm going to go for it today.
Recipe
Sweet shortcrust pastry Burke Street Bakery - Paul Allam and David McGuiness
Ingredients:
- 400g unsalted butter chilled take out 20 minutes before using
- 20 mls vinegar, chilled
- 100g caster sugar, chilled
- 170 mls water, Chilled
- 1 teaspoons of salt
- 665g all purpose plain flour. Chilled
Method
You can use a food processor but I never do, I make too much mess as it is.
Take your butter out of the fridge 20 minutes before using, cut into 1.5 cm cubes (roughly) put the vinegar and sugar in a bowl and add the water mix till sugar dissolves and set aside.
Put the flour and salt in a bowl and mix together, then toss in your butter. Rub the butter in to the flour to partly combine. You should have a floury mix with big pieces of butter. Turn out the mixture on to your bench, bring it all together and then sprinkle your sugar mix over the flour.
Now bring all the mixture together and then with the palm of your hand smear the dough away from you, do this 2 or 3 times. (hint: don't worry if the dough looks dry, when you come to roll it out it will all come together, there is so much butter in this recipe, there is no way it will end up dry).
Divide the dough in to 2 even portions and shape in to 2 round discs. Wrap individually in plastic film and put in the fridge for 2 hours before using.
Enjoy!