1,536 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...

Pastry doughs

To make a classic tart, you'll need a pastry of course, and if you don't use puff pastry (normally reserved for "fine", in french, tarts), you'll have a choice of shortcrust, shortbread, sweetcrust or "à foncer".

Let's take a look at the differences between these four.

8,512 4.4/5 (8 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Pastry Dough Shortbread Sweet Shortcrust Butter Sugar Flour Proportions Percentage

Last modified on: August 16^th 2024

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

Pastry doughs

First of all, what they have in common: All four are basic French pastry doughs, known as "sèches" (dry). They are made to fill molds, mainly for tarts or tartlets, and are very similar in appearance.
The minimum ingredients, common to all, are :

Flour
Butter
Sugar
Salt (a little)

The differences are more in the proportions, and particularly in the percentage of butter and sugar in relation to the flour.
Here's a table showing the values and percentages of each, for a recipe using 500g of flour:

	Shortcrust pastry (pâte brisée)	Shortbread pastry (pâte sablée)	Sweet pastry (pâte sucrée)	Pâte "A foncer"
Flour	500 gr	500 g	500 g	500 g
Butter	350 gr (70%)	350 gr (70%)	200 gr (40%)	150 gr (30%)
Sugar	20 gr (4%)	110 gr (22%)	250 gr (50%)	40 gr (8%)

And the same values in graph form:

pâtes en graphiques

As you can see, the doughs are very similar, only the proportions of sugar and butter vary. These are what characterize the dough, and determine what it's made for.

Of course, all this is related to the recipes I use, and which are on this same site, but there are practically as many as there are pastry chefs (pro or amateur), which obviously makes the proportions vary, and even sometimes the ingredients: some will tell you that there's no egg, but water or milk, in shortcrust pastry for example.

But here are a few general remarks:

As you'll have noticed, sweet pastry lives up to its name: it's very sweet.
There's a little sugar in pâte brisée, even though it's used in many savoury tarts, and this is important for coloring during baking (see this post on the subject).
Shortcrust pastry is very well accompanied by the same weight of almond powder as its weight of sugar, which makes it tastier and crunchier - it's even almost indispensable, in my humble opinion.
It might be tempting to replace butter with vegetable fat in these recipes, but that's not a very good idea, as the taste will be much worse.
To simplify things a little, we could say that shortcrust and "à foncer" dough are interchangeable for a recipe, and that it's the same for shortcrust and sweet pastry.
What they all have in common: They like the cold (which is your friend) and don't like to be kneaded or worked, otherwise they become elastic, so you need to mix their ingredients as quickly as possible.
What they all have in common: Ideally, they should be made the day before and left overnight in the fridge before use, and they freeze well raw, in the form of a large cake, not a ball.

To sum up: The four basic pastry doughs of French pastry-making: Brisée, sablée, sucrée and à foncer, differ above all in their ratio of butter and sugar to flour weight. These percentages determine their use.

Lasts posts

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 20257645

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 2025733

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 20252,2675

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 20257,2413

The grease spray

As soon as you have something in a recipe that sticks to the mold, the question always arises as to how difficult it is to remove from the mold. There's nothing more frustrating than breaking your cake when unmolding it, because part of it has stuck in the mold. The classic way to avoid this is...
August 26^th 20256,7725

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

What can I use for blind baking a pastry case?

When it comes to home-made desserts, tarts are always popular. They can be divided into two basic types: those cooked with their filling, such as an apricot and almond cream tart, and those where the filling is added after baking the pastry case, such as a strawberry tart or chocolate tart. For...
May 2^nd 2017112 K4.5

Coarsely chopped herbs

Although we are in the middle of winter as I write these lines, you should not hesitate to make salads at this time, it is actually quite simple, rather fast, and so pleasant. A while ago, I already told you that a salad is a salad, but a salad with herbs is immediately something much better:...
January 9^th 202114 K4.9

Double cooking of vegetables

When you cook vegetables, it's not easy to capture and preserve the flavours. It is easy to undercook, but you can make up for it, or overcook, and then it is unfortunately a bit cooked (in the sense of "ruined"). But above all, how to get the maximum of the taste of the vegetable in the pan, then...
July 12^th 201924 K4.1

What happens to the bread when you make it?

This bread that we eat every day, and that our baker makes for us, what happens during its manufacture so that it becomes bread? I will try to answer this question, and to summarize the complex alchemy that takes place.
May 28^th 202115 K4.9

Tranché, dissociated, failed, in short... missed!

When preparing a sauce or a cream, there's always a (small) risk that the creamy preparation you're working on will suddenly separate into two parts of different textures: a liquid part, for example, and a more or less solid part, or even become lumpy. It's terribly frustrating, but we'll see...
June 19^th 202312 K5