Why pastry crumbly

Pricking the pastry or weighing it down with baking beans or foil during baking. This can happen if too much sugar, or granulated sugar is used. Caster sugar should always be used in sweet pastry recipes to enable all of the sugar crystals dissolve. The bestselling toys for Christmas This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano. For every pastry problem, there is an answer.

Here's our comprehensive troubleshooter. Heavy handling and overworking dough are two common mistakes that result in pastry with an inferior, coarse—or heavy—texture.

Another general point for success with rolled-out pastry doughs is to pay attention to the working temperature of the ingredients, the environment and your hands.

Poor-quality pastry can be the result of preparation in conditions that are too warm or using ingredients that are not cool enough ; however, sometimes fats that have been chilled for too long can make pastry difficult to manage and this results in the dough becoming overworked. Soft and crumbly pastry: The chef has used too little water or self-raising flour instead of plain. Shrunk pastry: There was excess stretching during rolling out and the pastry was not allowed to rest or chill before baking.

Speckled pastry: If you encounter undissolved sugar grains in an enriched pastry crust, it's usually been caused by using coarser granulated sugar instead of caster sugar. Soggy, uncooked pastry base: If the pastry was not baked blind before the filling was added to your flan or tartlets, fruit juices cause the base of a double-crust pie to soften. However, if your pastry has baked for the recommended time and temperature and is much darker than expected, the dough may have been rolled too thin; thinner dough will cook much faster than thick dough.

Follow the directions for rolling out the dough to the right thickness and keep an eye on your pastries as they bake, as every oven operates differently. A pale pastry usually means that it is undercooked. Undercooking can be a result of rolling the dough too thick or setting the oven temperature too low.

Also, not using enough fat in the dough will create a pale color as fat aids in the browning process. A soggy pie bottom can be caused by a number of factors such as too much moisture or trapped moisture. If the oven temperature is too low, the steam will not evaporate quickly enough and the moisture will build up and gelatinize the flour. Not pricking the bottom of the pie crust before baking will sometimes cause steam to become trapped between the pie plate and pie crust, which will then gelatinize the flour and create sogginess.

If the pie filling is too moist, the crust will suffer the same effect. There are some tricks to avoid this such as sprinkling cookie crumbs on the bottom of the crust before adding the filling. Take care to bake at the temperature instructed in the recipe and prick the base of the crust before baking. Actively scan device characteristics for identification.