Shortcrust Pastry Puns

Hi! Longtime lurker, first time poster!

I’m trying to make Cornish pasties for the first time using this recipe from The Spruce Eats. I’ve never made shortcrust pastry before so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

The recipe calls for 1 cup flour, 2 oz butter, salt, and 2-3 tbsp water. I followed directions exactly, and added in 2 tbsp water at the end and began mixing with a knife. My dough was bone dry! So I added another tbsp. Still dry. It didn’t come together like any kind of cohesive dough until I was about 6 tbsp in. Then it started to stick together and looked like the dough in the photo.

Any idea why this happened? Did I do something wrong, or is the recipe wrong? Will I have problems with my dough now because I added too much water?

Also, I live in Colorado where it’s super dry, so maybe that has something to do with it?

Thanks for the help!

Seriously, who does this?! Sausage rolls should be wrapped in flaky puff pastry, anything else is wrong. Ruined my day.

Any longer than with raw eggs?

And would the recipe turn out worse with a pasteurized egg?

I'm desperate to find a good gluten free shortcrust pastry recipe, or any other pastry recipe that would suit a sweet tart/pie (specifically for British style Christmas Mince Pies). I'm in NZ so there's very little pre made gluten free stuff available and I cant order from overseas at the moment.

I fucked up making pastry last night, and added a bit too much water to my sweet shortcrust.

I ended up making a fresh batch for my pies, but now I have a kilo and a half of weird squishy pastry in my freezer that is clearly going to go tough and nasty if I use it as it is.

Is it worth trying to rescue it in some way? if I cut more flour in it's going to fuck up the fat ratio as well; is it worth attempting? Or can I transform it into some kind of cookie dough? Should I just toss it out?

Hi folks,

So I was trying to do an Australian style meat pie the other day. For those who don’t know that’s shortcrust sides, puff pastry top, mincemeat filling in the middle.

Whenever I tried to roll out the shortcrust it would keep cracking and splitting so that I couldn’t get a consistent sheet to work with. I tried adding a little more flour, a little more butter, a little water (obviously not all in one go), but none of them seemed to change the consistency. The dough had been chilling in a fridge for a few hours if that might be an issue... but the puff pastry was fine (with deadlines approaching I ended up just with a top crust pie which is at least filling if not really what I wanted.

Any tips?

Hello there,

I just found this nice sub because last time I baked a lemon merengue pie, the shortcrust kinda melted in the oven, giving me a somewhat flat disc of pastry!

This didn't happen the time before that. I'm making the crust with eggs, sugar, butter, a pinch of baking powder and a pinch of baking soda and flour (00 type). So I must have messed up the proportions of one or more ingredients! What ingredient, if added in excess, causes my crust to melt? I need it to retain its shape to fill it with my custard!

(Also this time I want to try and add freshly squeezed pomegranate juice to the lemon custard - they're both tart flavor profiles, did anyone do it with good results?)

Thanks!

I have been making Shortcrust which comes out pretty good without eggs for the past two years, now I stumbled across this tart Shortcrust dough recipe which puts egg yolk in it. Is that normal? Does it change the taste a lot? Or maybe the texture? Thanks!