What makes pastry crumbly

For smaller pies and tarts you can get away with quite a thin base as long as you bake it through, but for larger pies, the volume of filling can add a significant amount of weight, so reinforce your pie accordingly.

Adding too much water in the initial stage when you mix it with the butter and flour can mean that as the water evaporates in the oven, the structure of the pastry tightens up and shrinks, so be patient in the early stages and add the water gradually. The pastry will also shrink back if your oven is too cool during baking. Once again, this will happen if the water evaporates out of the pastry before the heat can set it in shape.

This will result in the all-too-common side collapses for blind baked tarts. So to recap — go easy on the water, chill until firm, and heat your oven to C to set your shape. When adding the water to the butter and flour, use very cold water and add it a tablespoonful at a time. Try to avoid this by rolling out gently on a lightly-floured surface, regularly turning ideally every one to two rolls.

A light touch is the key, and try to keep your hands cold! Usually, the reason for this is fairly simple — haste. If you look in the oven you can watch the pastry puffing up.

That is because the water in the butter is turning to steam and forcing each layer apart. Once forced apart, the fat in the butter or lard cooks each layer of pastry giving the flake.

This can be caused by a few factors, such as overmixing or over-kneading, there not being enough fat, the addition of too much flour , or too much liquid. Overmixing allows the gluten in the flour to develop into elastic strands, which creates a gummy texture, and since fat prevents the gluten from forming, too little will allow the elastic strands to form. Likewise, using too much flour changes the flour-to-fat ratio, leading to the same problem. And using too much liquid in the pie dough can allow the flour to gelatinize and become gummy.

Thus, it is important not to overmix and to make sure your ingredient measurements are accurate. A too delicate pastry dough or one that falls apart is a result of the exact opposite causes of a tough or gummy pastry.

Under mixing, using too much fat, or too little liquid does not allow the ingredients to bind together and virtually no gluten is formed, providing no structure. That is when the pastry becomes crumbly or is too tender to bake properly.

So, again, it is crucial to measure accurately and mix the ingredients the right amount. If your pastry has a doughy or wet texture it can be a result of one of two things. The first is using more liquid than needed, which causes too much gelatinization of the flour and leads to a doughy texture. The second is underbaking—since liquid evaporates during the baking process, not leaving the pastry in the oven long enough will produce a wet texture.

Our favourite fake Christmas trees for 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. Once you have diagnosed the reason why your pastry is crumbly, you will know how to fix it. For example, if you did not knead the dough enough, just mix it for a little while longer to get a nice smooth pastry. However, one method of fixing crumbly dough will work for almost any dry dough issue you may have and that is adding more water.

Do this and you will go from having a crumbly pastry dough to a wet, sticky pastry dough. Then you would have to add more flour, then more water, then more flour…. Water is a powerful ingredient and a tiny bit can work miracles! It can fix your crumbly dough but it can also give you the opposite problem of a wet pastry dough.