1,537 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

The right weight of pastry for a pie

Let's try to solve a thorny problem: How much dough will I need when I make my next pie?

You're planning to make a pie, you're going to use your favourite mould or circle, but how much pastry will you need to fill it completely with a well spread pastry, without being too thin, or on the contrary end up with a lot of extra pastry?

66 K 4.3/5 (42 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Baking Tips Weight Dough Pie Pan Diameter

Last modified on: March 20^th 2020

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

The right weight of pastry for a pie

This is not at all obvious actually, as ideally once the mould is lined it should only stick out about 1cm.

pie dough sticking out of the pan

You can of course use your own judgement, but at home I often use a 22 cm diameter (the small one), or sometimes 26 (the large one), and in any case I always get a 300 gr cake. And of course sometimes the big one is good, and sometimes the small one is too much. Well, it's not a tragedy either, if I have extra dough, I take advantage of it to make a few more tarts and it's fine.

excess pastry pie

By the way, if it's shortcrust pastry, there will never be any excess pastry, because it will be eaten, as soon as my back is turned, by the raw pastry aficionados I have at home...

Well, it's not all that, but can we do a little better than au pif? Yes, it's a pastry chef's trick, this weight of dough thing, and as they are people of numbers, of rigour, of precision, of grams and degrees, they have invented a kind of magic formula for that, linked to the diameter of your mould. It looks like this:

Weight of dough needed (gr) = diameter of the mould (mm) + 20.

For example, you have a 22 cm mould => 220 mm + 20 = 240 => you need 240 gr of batter.
Another example, 26 cm mould => 260 mm + 20 = 280 => you need 280 gr of batter.

plum tart

Very simple, isn't it? Well, be careful we're only one cow away anyway, and if you're not comfortable with a rolling pin to roll out the dough feel free to increase the magic number, and go from 20 to 30, or even 40.

In summary: To determine the right weight of pastry you need with your tart tin, you can apply the "magic" formula: pastry weight in gr = tin diameter in mm + 20.

Lasts posts

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20257305

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20259845

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 2025885

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20252,5055

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,3783

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

The golden-brown finish on puff pastry

Let's take a look at the tricky matter of producing puff pastry with an attractive, golden-brown finish. French pastry chefs call this "dorure" (literally, "gilding"). Behind this quirky term there lurks a real problem (and the solution): when using puff pastry (pâte feuilletée) for a pie, or...
February 8^th 201847 K 24.6

Candied fruits: don't get ripped off

Do you like candied fruit? You might like to nibble a handful or add it to a recipe, like a classic fruit cake or delicious Italian specialities like panettone or sicilian epiphany pie.
June 21^th 201767 K 24.2

Stand mixer tools

Whether we call it a stand mixer, food processor, or simply refer to it by brand (Kenwood, KitchenAid, etc.), this machine is a valuable tool for amateur cooks, bakers or pastry chefs like ourselves. All these machines come supplied with 3 different tools. Let’s take a look at their names and...
November 2^nd 201938 K4.5

The super powers of cornstarch

I start this new year by evoking an old product, that you most probably have in your cupboards, a white powder, often in a small cardboard package with a slightly outdated look, only the "gluten free" is relatively recent, it is simply cornstarch, hence its name of maïzena. It's used for a lot...
January 14^th 202215 K

The window-pane test in bread-making

The home bread-makers often ask themselves “Have I kneaded my dough long enough?” . A good question, as dough that is insufficiently kneaded will not rise properly or will fall flat when the top is slashed, which is very frustrating. To know when the dough is ready, one can rely on the length...
June 16^th 202196 K 23.9