Why buy supermarket pastry when it is so easy to make your own! And do you buy pastry bottoms to make quiches or tarts? Or do you avoid anything to do with pastry and just buy a ready made product?
Well, here is a simple way of making gorgeous pastry which will drop little flakes down your cleavage (if you have a cleavage, that is) as you eat it because it is so light and crumbly. And works every time.
Its easy: Half and half. Which is, whatever amount of flour you use, divide that by half to get the amount of fat you need. Rub it all together, add some water, squish it into a wadge, tip in out onto a lightly floured surface (preferably flat), then roll it with something until it comes out flattened. As I said, easy!
So: Flour: Plain, not self raising. The food gurus will tell you to use wholemeal flour but I find that the pastry turns out tasting heavy and clumsy if I do. It also tends to overwhelm whatever filling I have chosen to use. Since the pastry is supposed to be a background accompaniment and not the main part of a dish, this 'heaviness' I find undesirable. Wholemeal flour might be good for you, but if you are not going to like what you have cooked, then there is no point. But if you really must give in to guilt about using white flour, why not put one or two spoonfuls of wheatgerm in with it. Or bran, but not the bran from out of cereal packets.
And on the subject of fat: take no notice about what is good for you and what is not good for you. Since you are not likely to eat pastry and only pastry, day in and day out for months on end, then to hell with the people who say that fat is not good for you. If you have a varied diet you can eat most anything without any harm to yourself.
So why am I going on about fat? Because the 'fat' half of the recipe comprises butter and lard. In the UK I used 'Trex' for the 'lard' part. Here in France I can't get that, so I buy what I think is duck fat, only I can't interpret what is on the packet but since it is kept in the duck meat section of the supermarket I must presume it to be the fat from a duck. Whatever, it works, and is a good substitue for 'Trex'. I also sometimes use pork fat. Lordy, but I can hear the groans of disbelief from some of you, but trust me when I say that one can overlook the 'lard' content of the pastry when one eats the end result.
As for the butter: I use the budget butter, which works well.
Salt: a pinch or two of salt is also useful for pulling the flavours together. But not 'free running' table salt: use a good quality sea salt.
To make a batch of pastry then, you need:
8ozs plain flour.
2ozs butter, 2ozs lard (Trex, or any other type will be OK)
Pinch salt.
Cold water.
To make the pastry:
Put the flour into a bowl. Grate the butter to speed things up, and the lard if it needs it, (The duck fat is always so soft that it combines with the flour with hardly any effort at all, so doesn't need grating). Put these in with the flour. Add the salt.
Now combine the flour, butter, and lard, by rubbing the mixture through your fingers. You don't have to be dainty about doing this, but you won't get anywhere if you are heavy handed, so just be soft in your approach to the mix, working it through your fingers pleasurably. Now you could use an electric mixer or food processor to do this, but why deny yourself this delighful experience of rubbing flour and fat together. Plus, by the time you get your electrical appliance sorted out, you would have done the job with your hands, plus you won't have any washing up to do. Well, I suppose you would have to rinse your hands to remove the bits of pastry sticking to them, but that only takes a minute.
Now the lard part of the recipe makes for a stickier type of pastry, so you won't get the classic 'breadcrumbs' look which other recipes say you should achieve. This pastry tends to stick together in clumps.
And now you add some water, just enough to bind those clumps together, but not enough to make a soup-type mix. Not to worry, though, if you do add too much liquid: just add a little flour to dry the mix back up again.
And here is what you end up with:
Bools is licking his lips at the thought that the contents of the bowl might be coming his way. No chance!
So onto the floured surface goes the mix. Now you need to roll it out. To do this you will need a rolling pin, or you could fill a plastic bottle with water if you haven't got one.
Sprinkle a little flour onto the surface of the pastry, and gently roll it out, without manhandling it too roughly otherwise it might stick to the rolling pin, or stick to the surface of the table, or break. Not to worry, you can always scrunch it back up into a ball and start again. This pastry mix is very forgiving and unlike numerous other ways in which I have tried to make pastry over the years, this one one produces the most malleable, kind tempered, and superb tasting pastry every time, no matter how rushed or inattentive I am when making it.
To recap: Half to half: whatever quantity of flour you use, halve the weight for the amount of butter and lard, which should be of equal amounts. Therefore: 12 ozs of flour, 6 ozs fats (3 ozs butter, 3oz lard (or Trex).
Happy pastry making!
