Modern Baker: Sweet Tart Dough

      The first recipe I made from the Sweet Tarts & Pies section (the 59th recipe overall in this book) of The Modern Baker  by Nick Malgieri, was the one for Sweet Tart Dough, on page 160.  (We are not publishing recipes from the book, so if you like what you see, buy the book and bake along with or without us).  We will be in this section of the book from now until the end of July as there are 20 recipes in this section, roughly one per week for these next four months.

      The ingredient list for the Sweet Tart Dough:  all-purpose flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, butter, and eggs.
      The process for this was the same as for the Rich Pie Dough from the previous section...you toss all the ingredients in the food processor, whirl it around until it just begins to act like it will clump together, stop pulsing, turn out onto a piece of plastic wrap (if you are going to refrigerate it) or roll it right away.
      I always put the dough in plastic wrap and rest it in the refrigerator for an hour before rolling it to firm it up a bit as it makes rolling a bit easier.  This dough handles and rolls just beautifully, no trouble with it at all. 

      From here I will depart on what to do with the full recipe if you want to use a 6" tart pan as this pan is a new acquisition of mine and I am loving the size, shape, and ease of using it for making the tarts.  Why?  For starters it takes only 1/3 of the dough recipe and 1/4 of the filling recipe.  If you wish to have a reasonable amount of tart and not a lot left over and hanging around, this is a good size.  Since I am making quite a few tarts, both savory and sweet, for these sections of the book, I figured we could use less in volume since we were making so many of them, both in expense, and in calories.
      For the full dough recipe, there is about 15 ounces of dough, which I split into thirds, 5 ounces each.  I wrap them separately and put into the refrigerator if I'm going to use them within two days or into the freezer if it will be longer than two days.  I store them in the freezer in a container/baggie labeled with what the dough is and the size so that I don't forget what is in there as I have several types of dough that I make and have on hand.
      The three dough packages were fitted into one six inch tart pan and two seven inch pie plates (these are half the size/volume of a regular 8-9 inch pie).
      At this point, I put two into the refrigerator to firm up and use right away and one into the freezer which I will take out when I start making the pie filling for it later in the week so that it will ready to go into the oven when I finish. 

      The dough is very nice to work with and the taste is also delicious.  It is a bit sweeter than my normal  MS "It's a Good Thing" pie dough, but nicely so.  I will probably go between this recipe and the MS one as we like them both.  (Maybe if I have a really sweet filling I would use the less sweet dough for instance, and vice versa.)  This Sweet Tart Dough recipe is definitely going into the regular line up here, it's a great dough.

      If you would like to bake along or be a part of the Modern Baker group, you will find all that, plus a tab to link to the blogs posting the Breads, with the blogroll here.