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Baked sweet pastry case
Photo: Romain Behar, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain (cropped)

Pastry · Recipe No. 8

Sugar Paste (Sweet Pastry)

Sugar paste is the classic British catering name for sweet shortcrust pastry, the crisp case for flans and tarts. A food processor makes it in about two minutes and handles it far less than fingers do, so it stays short and tender.

  • Serves 12
  • Makes about 550 g
  • Lines three 18 cm flan rings
  • Food processor: 2 min
  • French / British

Sugar paste, pâte sucrée, sablée and brisée ↓

Method

  1. Put the flour (300 g), salt and sugar (50 g) in a food processor and pulse two or three times to mix.

  2. Add the cold diced butter (150 g). Pulse in short one-second bursts, 10 to 15 times, until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs with no lumps of butter bigger than a lentil.

  3. Add the beaten egg (1 egg) and pulse again, a few seconds at a time, just until the crumbs start to cling together in small clumps. Stop before it forms a ball. If it still looks dry and will not hold when you pinch it, add the cold water (2 tsp) a teaspoon at a time.

  4. Tip the crumbs onto the worktop and press them together with your hands into a smooth dough in a few seconds; do not knead it. Flatten into a disc about 2 cm thick, wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes.

  5. To use, roll the pastry out on a lightly floured surface to about 3 mm thick. If it cracks straight from the fridge, leave it for a few minutes to soften slightly. Line your flan ring or tart tin, prick the base and chill again for 15 minutes before baking: this helps stop it shrinking.

  6. To bake blind, line the case with baking paper and baking beans and bake at 190°C (170°C fan) for 15 minutes. Remove the paper and beans and bake for another 5–10 minutes, until the base is dry and pale gold (longer, until golden all over, for a filling that is not baked again).

Tip: tap a step to tick it off as you cook.

Chef’s notes

  • Why the processor works so well: the butter stays cold, and the blade mixes the egg in within seconds. The less the dough is worked, the less gluten develops, so the pastry stays short and crisp instead of tough and shrinking.
  • Keep everything cold. If the kitchen is warm, chill the diced butter (and even the flour and the processor bowl) for 15 minutes first.
  • One batch lines three 18 cm flan rings (for our Apple Flan use a third of it), or one 28 cm tart tin with enough left over for a few tartlets.
  • Storage: wrapped, the dough keeps for 3 days in the fridge or 3 months in the freezer; thaw it overnight in the fridge.
  • Variations: add the finely grated zest of a lemon or orange with the sugar, or a few drops of vanilla with the egg. Half butter and half margarine also works, but the pastry is less rich.

Other ways to make it

By hand (rubbing in)

  1. Sift the flour and salt into a cool bowl and add the cold diced butter.
  2. Rub the butter in lightly with your fingertips, lifting the mixture as you go, until it looks like fine sand.
  3. Whisk the sugar into the beaten egg until it has almost dissolved.
  4. Make a well in the crumbs, pour in the egg and mix with a round-bladed knife, drawing the crumbs in until the paste just holds together. Add a little cold water only if needed.
  5. Press into a disc, wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes before rolling.

Creaming (the French pâte sucrée method)

  1. Use the butter soft rather than cold. Beat it with the sugar (icing sugar is best here) until smooth but not fluffy.
  2. Beat in the egg a little at a time.
  3. Add the flour and salt and mix on low speed, or with a spatula, only until it comes together.
  4. Wrap and chill for at least an hour: this dough starts softer and needs longer to firm up. It gives a very fine, even, snappy case for tarts filled after baking.

Whichever method you use, stop mixing as soon as the dough holds together.

A little history: sugar paste and the French sweet pastries

Sugar paste is the old British catering-school name for sweet shortcrust pastry. Victor Ceserani and Ronald Kinton's Practical Cookery, a standard textbook for trainee chefs since it first appeared in 1962, calls it sugar paste (pâte à sucre) and uses it for its fruit flans: apple, cherry, rhubarb, banana and more. Today cake decorators use the same word for something quite different: in British shops “sugarpaste” usually means ready-to-roll fondant icing for covering cakes.

French pâtisserie has a whole family of short pastries. Pâte brisée (“broken” pastry) has little or no sugar and is used for savoury tarts and quiches. Pâte sucrée (“sugared” pastry) is sweetened and usually bound with egg; it bakes to a crisp, firm case that holds a filling without going soft. Pâte sablée (“sandy” pastry) has the most butter and sugar and crumbles like shortbread, which makes it delicious but fragile to roll. Authorities do not quite agree on where one ends and the next begins: some define pâte sucrée by the creaming method (butter and sugar beaten together before the flour goes in) and pâte sablée by rubbing in (sablage), while the Traité de pâtisserie moderne simply calls sweetened pâte brisée pâte sucrée. Our sugar paste is made by the rubbing-in route.

The French masters made their pastes by hand on the board. Escoffier's Guide to Modern Cookery (1907) gives a “dry sugared paste” of one pound of flour, seven ounces of butter, five ounces of sugar, three eggs and orange-flower water: “mix in the usual way, knead it twice”. Anne Willan, founder of the La Varenne cookery school, finishes her pâte brisée by fraisage, pushing the dough away with the heel of the hand to blend in the butter evenly without overworking it.

The food processor changed all that. The French catering salesman Pierre Verdon designed a bowl with a revolving blade for professional kitchens, and his company Robot-Coupe was founded in 1960; its Magimix brought the idea to British homes in 1974, and Kenwood followed in 1979. Pastry turned out to be one of the machine's best jobs. Delia Smith's team notes that many sweet pastry recipes can be made in a processor because they are bound with egg rather than water that has to be judged by feel; Jamie Oliver's reliable sweet shortcrust offers the processor as an alternative to fingertips; and Martha Stewart's pâte sucrée warns against processing for more than 30 seconds once the liquid goes in.

Use it for

Sources for these notes

Shopping list for 12 portions

Dairy & eggs

Baking

Store cupboard (check you have)

Converted from the Cookeryonline Excel workbook “SR8”.