Pastry help

Linda32

hilstep2000 wrote: »

I have made shortcrust pastry the way I was taught in domestic science. Half fat to flour, so 8oz flour, 4oz fat. Broken into 2oz marg and 2oz lard. Bind together with water, rest for an hour. Always works for me.

This works for me as well. My pastry used to be rubbish, would have made a decent house brick

I use 2oz of butter, although at Christmas I did use, something, not butter and not marg, from Sainsburys 'suitable for baking' as it was half the price of butter. This worked but butter is nicer IMO. And half Cookeen, its abit like lard and a little more money, about 25p more at a guess, but it works for me and if I'm going to the effort.....

Justamum

I make pastry using just Pure margarine - I don't bother with the white fat at all. My DH swears I make the best pastry in the world!

VfM4meplse

mumtosix wrote: »

How can I improve my pastry baking skills?

Never mind that, how did you manage to find time to make pastry with 6 children??! :eek:

I'd never heard of Trex so have just googled it. Although I can see that it's been around for years, I'm a bit suspicious of it. Can it really have no hydrogenated fat? Apparently you need to use 20% less of it than other fats - so that's 40g of Trex to 100g flour - but I do wonder if it would get through food safety regs if it were launched today.

morganlefay

I always have trouble with pastry tho I've been trying to cook it for years. This Xmas I managed to make the 'best mince pies ever' come out really well by doing some things I hadn't done before... I bought a cheap silicone mat thing from Lidl and used it to roll the pastry out on (with a dusting of flour.) BUT I also put a sheet of clingfilm over the pastry so I rolled it through the cling - it made it much easier, and I also bought a long metal palatte knife to lift the cut pastry rounds into the tart tin. I don't know if any of these would help you ?

Penelope_Penguin

mumtosix wrote: »

I made short crust pastry yesterday for my pie using Trex; mixed flour, salt & fat into bread crumbs then added iced water to make dough. I put the Dough in the fridge for about 1 hr till I needed it. Rolled it out but it just sort of crumbled. Managed to put on top of pie & cooked. Looked ok when it came out of the oven. It tasted ok but sort of melted in the mouth - what did I do wrong? His can I improve my pastry baking skills?

Somehow, you've sterted 2 threads, each with replies I've merged them and deleted one of your original posts.

Justamum

VfM4meplse wrote: »

Never mind that, how did you manage to find time to make pastry with 6 children??! :eek:

It only takes a couple of minutes.