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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.

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Last modified on: August 16^th 2024

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

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.

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