1,464 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

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.

4,511 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 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

The little trap of thick cream

When you need to add cream to a recipe, you might be wondering: thick (heavy) cream or liquid cream? In most cases, there's no big difference: you can use either. But there is one exception, and that's when the cream needs to be cooked, for a sauce for example, and here the difference between...
December 13^th 20248145

Sauce and salad: When and how to mix them?

When dressing a salad, there's a kind of golden rule: add the dressing very shortly before serving, especially if your salad contains crunchy elements such as croutons or fresh vegetables, which will retain their crunchiness or crispiness. But, as is often the case in the kitchen, there are...
November 29^th 20241,0975

No need to boil gelatin

Gelatin is a magical ingredient for making light, creamy, structured desserts, yet it's often misused in the kitchen. A common mistake in some recipes is the idea that it needs to be boiled for it to work properly, but this is a mistake indeed: gelatin melts at a much lower temperature, around...
November 21^th 20241,2745

Your oven in "proofer" mode

In the bakery, proofing is a crucial stage in the process of making light, plump breads and pastries. During proofing, the yeast ferments the sugars present in the dough, releasing carbon dioxide which forms bubbles. This process allows the dough to swell and aerate, guaranteeing a soft, light...
September 27^th 20244,3315

The right size of zucchini

When you buy zucchini at the market, you're often offered a wide variety of sizes, from very small to very large. But which ones to choose? Here are a few tips.
September 9^th 20244,5185

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

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 202189 K 23.9

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 201758 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 201933 K4.5

What is the difference between bakery and patisserie?

This is a question that you may well have asked yourself and which I will attempt to answer. In France the two trades of "boulangerie" (bakery) and "pâtisserie" (patisserie and confectionery) have always been quite distinct, but where exactly do the boundaries lie? .
February 7^th 2017124 K 14.1

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 202110 K4.9