Mastering Pie Dough – Strawberry & Rhubarb Galettes – The Boy Who Bakes

In this weeks video I show you how to master a super flaky pie dough and how to use that to make a super simple strawberry and rhubarb galette.

Full Recipe Here https://www.theboywhobakes.co.uk/recipes/2020/5/1/mastering-flaky-pie-dough-strawberry-amp-rhubarb-galettes
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Hey guys welcome back today i want to talk about pie dough specifically flaky pie dough [Applause] because today we’re going to make galettes really beautiful rustic easy to make gillette i’m going to fill it with rhubarb and strawberry but first let’s talk about the dough so we want something super flaky so you

Might ask why are we not just using puff pastry you can buy pretty good puff pastry it’s incredibly flaky surely it’s the right thing for this recipe let me explain why it’s not quite the right option Okay so puff pastry is made up of these layers of butter pastry butter pastry butter pastry you roll out the dough and the butter is encased and you get these super thin layers of butter and repeats multiple times and the science part is that as it bakes those layers push

Open and the butter evaporates and creates steam and it creates these really open layers but the problem is these dough layers are so thin that they become fragile and what can happen is when it’s got a big fruit filling on top a the bottom of it won’t be flaky

It’ll be dense but it will also absorb too much moisture and it can become gummy so in my mind it’s best for just throwing on top of something like a pot pie where the moisture is not sitting on it or it’s good for things where you’re assembling it after the fact i don’t

Think it makes the best pie crust like a classic pie crust but it does teach us one lesson these shards of butter will really help that’s what we’re looking for but we don’t want it as perfect as flaky as puff pastry we want something a little bit more rustic so

What we can do is take the idea and just make sure it’s not completely repeating in even lines we’re going to break it up a little bit so there’s a bit of dough there’s a flake there’s dough it’s much more uneven and what that will mean is we still get beautiful flakiness

But it holds itself it has a little bit more sturdiness it’s a little bit more rustic for better word but it’ll make a much better pie and yes this is a lobster pen that we bought in hong kong and i love it so before we can actually get started on

Making the pie dough we need to take our butter in this case it’s a whole packet of butter 250 grams of butter you need to dice it and then we need to get it very very cold and this is the first really important lesson about pie dough

And generally most pastry and that is you want to keep everything cold and that’s especially true with pie dough because if everything is cold you’re more likely to get big chunks that will flake and will steam and will create that flakiness if the butter’s too warm

When you mix it into the dough it will just completely get mixed in and you’ll end up with something that’s just much denser it won’t have that lightness so we’re just going to cut it into cubes and we’re going to throw it in the fridge for about 20 minutes

Or in the freezer for about 10 just to get it super cold so whilst our um butter is chilling let’s talk about other ingredients obviously we have plain flour we have some caster sugar and we have some salt now these are really important so do not leave them out the sugar

Is going to add a little bit of sweetness which is obviously needed but also it’s going to help to brown the crust sugar will caramelize as it bakes so we need to have that in there for color and just for taste the salt does something similar

It’s going to add flavor to the base of the dough which again is super important if you leave out salt you’ll have a pastry that just tastes of kind of nothing it’ll be really bland so do not leave it out all we’re going to do is mix that together

And then i’m going to grab the butter [Applause] Okay so once our butter is nice and cold i’m gonna add about a quarter of it straight to the flour now this quarter what we’re gonna do is we’re just gonna rub it in and what that’s gonna do it’s gonna add tenderness so once our butter is

Nicely rubbed in the flour is coated in fat and that will add a nice level of tenderness but obviously this is a flaky powder so what we’re going to do now add our chilled diced butter i’m going to do is toss that around in the flour so it’s coated and then all

We’re going to do is take these pieces of butter and we’re just going to press them flat just using your fingertips again because they’re the colors part and this is what we’re looking for nice kind of shards of butter and like in the puff pastry as they get rolled out

Later on they’ll create really thin pieces of butter and it’ll create flakiness but just the right kind of like pie dough flakiness that we are looking for so just keep doing this by pressing them you will warm up the butter so we are going to do the next

The most important thing once again we’re going to chill it again so as soon as this is all done as soon as all the pieces of butter are pressed i’m going to throw it back in the fridge for about 20 minutes [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] so once our butter and our flour mixture is cold we can add our water which is also very cold we also have a secret ingredient and that ingredient is vodka okay so let me explain a little bit we don’t want to develop too much gluten and water

Equals gluten so adding vodka which is almost no water in it even though it is a liquid helps prevent gluten development with our cold butter we’re using cold water because we don’t want to increase the warmth too much we don’t want to make the butter soft you want to keep it

Nice and solid so what we’re going to do is add our vodka to the water and then all we’re going to do is pour in our water about a tablespoon or so at a time and we’re just gonna stir kind of lightly tossing it together just to kind of create

Loose crumbs we’re not trying to knead it too much we just want to bring everything together to moisten everything don’t worry if the butter breaks down a little bit that’s going to happen we’re just trying to prevent it happening too much and then once that water and our vodka mixture is in there

We can then get our hands involved just bring that dough together briefly you don’t do this for too long again because you don’t want to chill you don’t warm up the butter okay so you can see our dough is fairly uniform it’s sticking together there’s a few cracks

But it doesn’t feel dry and with just one or two needs it comes together and there’s just no dry pockets it’s a really good sign i’m gonna throw this back in the freezer just because it’s really warm in my apartment today and we don’t want this to warm up too

Much because we’re gonna roll it we’re gonna kind of do a cheats lamination to add in extra layering [Applause] now i know lamination can be a scary word for people but don’t worry this is a cheats lamination it takes two minutes but it really helps to make an extra

Flaky dough it’s well worth doing so pop that fear out of your mind this is easy okay so lamination normally means to roll out an encase with extra butter so in this case what you would do is you’d roll out the dough you’d put butter on top and then you’d fold it

Back up this is a lot simpler all we’re going to do is take a little bit of flour just dust the work surface so the pastry doesn’t stick what we’re gonna do is roll it out into a rectangle that’s roughly 14 15 by 45 centimeters but again the exact

Size doesn’t matter too much and we’re just going to roll it up like a sausage so the idea for this rolling motion this kind of fake lamination comes from portugal and it comes from the bakers who make um portuguese custard pasta they make their dough and then they

Roll it up once it’s finished they do it with like a kind of very soft fat but for this we’re just going to kind of borrow the idea and it creates almost like little extra kind of micro flakes throughout the dough and it just helps to create a flakier dough

If you just take a look at this dough you can see all these smears of butter and what that’s going to do is that’s going to create a wonderfully flaky dough so that’s our rough rectangle now like the bakers of portugal all we’re going to do is roll this dough

Up just into a nice tight sausage and then all i’m going to do is cut that into two pieces with a bench scraper and you can see lots and lots of layering in there and that comes from the butter and from our rolling so just press that into a disc

And then we can refrigerate that until we need it [Applause] at this stage we need to put the dough in the fridge for at least four hours preferably overnight though and i know this is going in the fridge a lot but trust me it helps it really helps to hydrate the dough

It’ll roll better you’ll get a better end result so if you have the time do it but yeah i know we’re using the fridge a lot So for the filling for these gillettes i’m gonna do a mixture of strawberry and rhubarb which is such a brilliant combination but normally in the uk the best rhubarb and the best strawberries don’t cross in terms of this season but at the market the other day i found some really great rhubarb

And some early strawberries that were good enough to make this combo super delicious we want something that’s nice and flavorful bland strawberries are just gonna make bland galettes so try and use strawberries that are at their peak when the flavor is really nice and strong so because

The rhubarb you get in the supermarket let’s cut a while we just want to cut these tough ends off and if you’re buying them fresh obviously you’ll also have all from the farmers market you will also have the stock end to get rid of but again mine’s

Just a little bit dry so i’m going to cut those off and then we’re going to cut these into just small slices you don’t want them too thick because they won’t cook quick enough because rhubarb can be a little bit tough especially if it’s on the thicker older

Side so just cut that into pieces So for the strawberries pinch off the green and then just slice the top quicker easier less fuss so apart from the fruit we need a couple of extra bits for our filling so we need a sweetener for which i am going to use classic caster sugar

And then we also need a thickener and again i’m staying classic i’m going to use corn flour now for the flavorings we’re going to add a couple of additional extras one of which is normal one of which is a little bit strange so obviously we’re going to use a little

Bit of vanilla vanilla is super classic goes with all those fruits but then i’m also going to add something a little bit more unusual i’m going to add some almond extract now the reason for the almond extract is in the bottom of these gillettes i spread a thin layer of ground almonds

And that’s mainly there to help absorb moisture so we get nice crisp bases to the galettes but it doesn’t really add any flavor because ground almonds don’t have a ton of flavor and i really like the almond element with the rhubarb with the strawberry so just a couple of drops about quarter of

A teaspoon of the almond extract adds something delicious to the recipe if you don’t like the idea of that leave it out it’s totally fine berries can release a lot of juice and that means we’ll get soggy bottoms to our pastries we’re not going to get that beautiful

Crisp pastry so i’m going to do a two-step process and this might seem like a little bit of extra work but it’s really easy and you don’t have to regret it too much so what i’m going to do is going to take my sugar i’m going to add that to my fruit mixture

And then i’m going to let it sit for 30 minutes and what that’s going to do it’s going to do what’s called macerating and that just means drawing out the juices and so after 30 minutes you should see that the fruit is kind of swimming and liquid and that’s what would happen

In the pie in the galettes so it would mean soggy pastry so what we’re going to do is we’re going to strain off those juices and reduce them which a concentrates the flavor making it even more delicious and it reduces the water meaning that we don’t have as

We don’t have a higher risk of making bad soggy pastry so when the liquid is reduced we’re just going to take some of that add that to our corn flour and just whisk that to make a slurry and the reason we do this is it prevents the corn flour from clumping

When we add it to the liquid and then scrape in our slurry and then just mix that together and to that we’re going to add a tiny bit of almond extract and our vanilla bean paste and then just stir that together For the dough because we’re not rolling it out like we want one big gullet i’m actually going to roll this out into a rectangle and i want the rectangle to be roughly six inches wide and that way we should get as many pieces as possible from one roll of the dough rather than

Having to re-roll the scraps multiple times so my aim with this first roll is to get three discs of pastry there we go so now that dough is nicely rolled out i’m just going to cut out our discs so just use a pairing knife to run around and then we’re going to take

Those this dough and we’re going to place them onto a parchment-lined sheet pan sheet tray to chill in the fridge until they’re firm again so to assemble the tarts all we’re going to do is take a disc of our chilled pastry we’re going to add a spoonful of

Ground almonds push that into a layer and then we’re going to top that with some of our fruit mixture you don’t want to pile this too high you want this in a nice kind of fairly flat layer and then we’re going to form the galettes so to do that all we’re

Gonna do is lift up one edge and then fold over and just keep folding and turning as you go around like that then just carefully lift that up transfer it to our baking tray and we’re gonna pop that in the fridge until they’re solid [Applause] okay so now that our galettes are nice

And cold all we need to do is brush them with some egg wash sprinkle them liberally with demerara sugar or sanding sugar then we’re going to get them in the oven so the glass is going to go in the oven set to 200 degrees celsius and they’re

Going to be in there for 10 minutes you can reduce the temperature to 180 degrees and leave them in there for another 10 to 15 until the pastry is golden if you find that the filling is darkening a bit too much it might be catching

Just tense it with a little bit of foil just to stop it from burning so that is the finished let’s they’re super delicious really nice rustic summery dessert that we can enjoy right now and you can see that because we’ve put that layer of ground almonds on the base the bottom of the

Pastry is super crisp which is exactly what we want really nice flaky pastry soft fruity filling as always the recipe is linked up in the corner of the video or down in the description box as well don’t forget to subscribe to the channel i’m making new baking videos every single week and

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