1,560 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...

Pre-calibrated pastry dough

When making pie dough (shortbread, shortcrust, sweet...), it's always a good idea to make a lot at once, and then divide it into pieces, which you can freeze.
I've already pointed out the mistake not to make, which is to form a ball before freezing.
It's difficult to roll out afterwards because the dough breaks up. Instead, form a large patty, which is much easier to roll out afterwards.

Another very practical method is to pre-roll the dough and then freeze it.

179

Keywords for this post:Pastry Dough Pie Rolling out Rolling pin

Last modified on: March 9^th 2026

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

Pre-calibrated pastry dough

As I said in the introduction, don't make a ball before freezing, but a large galette, although you can do even better with the pre-spread dough.

How does it work?

The principle is very simple: you make your dough, shortbread dough for example, you weigh the dough pieces and you form a galette with your fingers, as usual, it's afterwards that things change.

Place your galette on a sheet of baking paper.

Place a second sheet on top, and roll out as if you were going to make your tart immediately afterwards.
Note that this is very easy with soft dough that has just been kneaded, and that it doesn't stick thanks to the sheets of baking paper.
Here too, pastry rulers are handy for spreading evenly.

Once your dough is the right shape and thickness, you're done.

(don't forget to write the date and type of dough on the paper), you're going to put it directly into the freezer between its 2 sheets of paper.

What are the advantages of this method?

freezing and defrosting, due to the thinness of the dough, are very quick
The dough is protected by the 2 sheets of paper, so there's no need to wrap itYou
can take the dough disc out of the freezer, remove the 2 sheets of paper, and place it, still hard, on your tart tin, leaving it to defrost undisturbed
The dough discs take up very little space in the freezer, but on the other hand take up a lot of surface area, so you need a large enough freezer.

To sum up: to freeze pie dough very efficiently, you can pre-spread it between 2 sheets of baking paper and then freeze it with the papers.
The resulting disk of pastry is very convenient to use, thaws quickly and is already the right shape and thickness, making it easy to deep-freeze.

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 20252,7785

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 20251,7575

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 20251,611

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 20255,5725

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 20259,5873

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

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 2017135 K 14.1

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 201769 K 24.2

Egg yolks and caster sugar

We often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to be a very ordinary and simple thing to do but, be warned, these two ingredients can behave oddly together.
February 15^th 201884 K 24.3

Artichoke stalks

When preparing artichokes for cooking, you may well already know that we often need to remove the first round of leaves, if they are tatty or dirty, as well as the inedible stalk. The operative word here is “remove” , rather than “cut off”.
October 25^th 201654 K4.3

85 grams of eggs?

Some time ago, I already spoke to you about the difference between baking and pastry-making, I emphasized, among other things, the precision of pastry-making which requires grams, cm, degrees and minutes. That's why, on the one hand, you have baking and cooking, where a certain tolerance is...
November 26^th 201857 K4.6