SWEET, short and rough — no, not a three-word description of the MasterChef judges — but three pastries that all our contestants and any aspiring home cook really need to have a handle on if they want to excel in the kitchen. There is however a dizzying mountain of advice when it comes to making pastry and it is sometimes hard to know what to ignore and what to take as gospel.

THE BASICS

At its core pastry is very simple. It’s just flour and fat bound together with a little liquid.

My basic rule is three parts flour, two parts fat like butter and one part water for a basic shortcrust. If you want a sweet pastry add a ½ of a part of sugar. So a simple recipe for pastry would be 300g of plain flour, 200g of fat, 100g of water and, if you want a sweet pastry add 50gm of sugar.

Obviously pastry chefs being chefs want to tweak this — and they do. There are probably as many recipes for pastry as there are names to call the referee or umpire who fails to pay that obvious free kick. I do also have to admit that often I’ll up the quantity of fat and sugar and might also split that fat between a mix of butter and lard in savoury pastries because I like the flakiness it brings.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FAT

It is the lumps of fat the melt away that make the pastry flaky and, if you use more butter, crispy too. While traditional puff pastry takes seemingly endless repeated steps of folding, rolling and waiting for the pastry to chill again, a rough puff is a far quicker prospect.

Just cube 250g of butter and chill to almost freezing, then “cut” the butter into 250g of flour using a couple of knives like you would for scones. Stop when there are still visible lumps of butter let in the mix. Cut in 120ml of iced water and a tablespoon of lemon juice and then combine the dough with your hands into a brick shape. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge. Then it’s just a matter of rolling out the dough into a rectangle, folding it in on itself, rotating 90degrees and repeating. Chill the dough and repeat this process as many times as you can be bothered. The more you do it the more layers you’ll get in your ruff puff.

ADD ACID

The other key addition to pastry is a little acidity because this will help retard the development of gluten in your pastry. This is important if you want your pastry to be crumbly. Remember, gluten makes the pastry tough.

Adding a teaspoon or so of lemon juice or cider vinegar to your water is one way to go, the other is to use an acidic ingredient. For my money of all Maggie Beer’s wonderful culinary achievements, her sour cream pastry is the best. She crumbs 250g of plain flour with 200g of chilled unsalted butter and then adds 125ml of sour cream to form the dough.

CHILL OUT

Another piece of pastry gospel is that your ingredients should always be cold before you use them, which means chilled cubes of butter and iced water for example.

Heat and pressure are the two biggest enemies of pastry. Pressure develops the gluten and heat melts the butter and impacts on the flakiness of the pastry. With this in mind, UK pastry guru Michel Roux, always advises making pastry in a cold room.

USE A PROCESSOR

Keeping things chilled is why I use a food processor to make my pastry as this means my hot hands don’t come into contact with the pastry. Also if I am being really pedantic I can chill the blades and the bowl of the processor.

If you don’t have a food processor then you’ll need to the rub the flour and butter together with the tips of your fingers to minimise heat transference.

This is called “pecking” and it gives a fine insight into the technique you should use. Just remember to lift and rub when rubbing butter into the flour. I personally prefer the description of “pinching in” the butter between thumb and fingers.

Either way make sure you don’t overdo this process. You want to leave flecks and little nuggets of the butter in the crumb. I also use the processor to add the liquid and gently bring the dough together — stopping immediately a ball of dough is formed. Here the secret is to add as little of the liquid, whether it be water, sour cream or in the form of eggs, as possible to bring the dough together.

This can also be done on the bench but be gentle and when it comes to working the dough use the heel of your hand to push through the dough effectively smearing the dough away from you in technique called “fraisering”. If you are making pastry by hand remember to remove any jewellery or watches, and wash your hands before you start.

REST UP & RELAX

Balled up and slightly flattened, the pastry then needs to be rested in the fridge wrapped in kitchen wrap for at least 30 minutes but ideally an hour.

This chills the pastry (and the butter in it) back down again and also helps it relax from all that pressure applied to it. The same is true with a lined pastry tin for a tart. Chill it before you blind bake it.

ROLLING or …

When it comes to rolling out the pastry, flour the work surface — some use gluten-free rice flour rather than plain flour to good effect — and always work away from you with the rolling pin.

Rotate the pastry to continue the process. There is a belief in some quarters that smacking the pastry ball firmly with your rolling pin before you start helps their pastry to behave but I’ve never tasted any difference between smacked and unsmacked dough.

The only time I use this is with near frozen butter for puff pastry or with cold hard pastry as a couple of tap seems to soften things without bringing the temperature up.

Some will also tell you that you should roll the pastry only once before rotating but this is a pain and means you handle the dough more with those hot hands of yours so I ignore that rule.

Having said that it can mean you use less flour to stop the pastry sticking to the bench. Rolling out pastry on a silicon mat can help with this. Also always roll out the pastry to a size so that it will overflow the case. Remember to brush off any excess flour on either side of the pastry before lining your dish or tin.

... GRATING

Another approach rather than rolling is to grate your ball of pastry coarsely into your 30cm tart tin and then press it down with your fingers. This works particularly well with a pear and almond tart from one of my inspirations, Rose Grey from the River Cafe.

Her pastry is made from crumbing 350g of plain flour with 175g of chilled butter. Then adding 100g of icing sugar and egg yolks one at time until the dough comes together. This will take three or four egg yolks depending on the size of eggs.

BLIND BAKING

To avoid soggy pastry, blind bake tart bases before filling. This means baking it protected by a sheet of baking paper and weighed down with rice, a new dog chain or whatever you are using as baking weights for 10 minutes.

Next brush the base with egg wash, patch any holes and return to the oven for another 10 minutes to seal and tan those inside surfaces. If you are making a pie there’s no need to blind bake the case but for the things that you must do check out my pie-making column from a few months ago online at taste.com.au.

Happy baking!