The Classic French Dough I Use to Make All My Tarts

My go-to pastry dough is pâte sablée, a sweet, cookie-like dough that can be baked into a tart shell or sliced and baked as cookies. Sablé, which means “sand” or “sandy” in French, refers to the dough’s crumbly texture when baked; it is one of several essential French tart doughs, including pâte brisée and pâte sucrée. Like pâte sucrée, pâte sablée is a versatile dough consisting of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. Sablée recipes, however, frequently call for powdered sugar instead of granulated or caster sugar, giving the dough a more tender, crumbly texture than its sucrée and brisée counterparts. My love of pâte sablée is all about the fact that it’s the most like a cookie of all of the classic French doughs—this makes it perfect for desserts like a lemon tart or fresh fruit tart, in which you want a sweet, short crust. 

While it’s incredibly delicious, delicate pâte sablée is also slightly more finicky than its pastry siblings. Some recipes have cooks incorporate just a single yolk, but I find that those doughs are more difficult to work with and fall apart easily. So in my recipe below, I incorporate a whole egg: The proteins in the egg whites provide structure, making the dough easier to work with, while the fat in the yolks give the dough additional richness. A touch of almond flour adds a nutty note, while also giving the dough a satisfying crispness after it’s been baked. 

A tart shell made from pâte sablée is wonderful with fruit or frangipane, and you can also use the dough as the base to make intricate layered French desserts called entremet. Sablée also makes a great cookie: I frequently use it to make slice-and-bake sablés hollandaise (chocolate-and-vanilla checkerboard cookies) and I also sometimes put the dough in a piping bag to create decorative swirled cookies. Here are my tips on how to make a pâte sablée for pâtisserie-worthy desserts at home.

Key Techniques for Making Pâte Sablée

Sablage. In this recipe, you’ll use your fingertips to rub cold butter into flour, confectioners’ sugar, and ground almonds to create a sandy dough. This traditional French pastry technique—called sablage—helps coat the flour in fat to inhibit gluten development, resulting in a crumbly (in a good way!), tender crust. Some sablée recipes call for creaming softened butter with sugar in a stand mixer, but I reserve that approach for sablé à la poche—piped sablé cookies—which require a soft, pipeable dough. Creaming very soft butter is ideal if you need a dough soft enough to pipe, but makes less sense when you plan on rolling it out between parchment before chilling it, as it’ll take much longer to firm up again.

Fraisage. The other essential French technique in this dough is fraisage, which involves using the heel of your hand to smear the dough against a work surface. This helps evenly combine the butter, egg, and dry ingredients, and also distributes fat and moisture for a short, crumbly dough.  

Resting the dough. Resting and chilling the dough at various points throughout the process helps the gluten relax and keeps the butter cold, resulting in a tender crust that holds its shape when baking. 

Roll the dough between parchment. Sablée is delicate and slightly sticky, with a tendency to break or tear when manipulated. Rolling the pastry between two sheets of parchment makes it easier to place in a tart pan: After the rolled dough has chilled and firmed up, you’ll peel away away one side of the parchment, invert the dough onto the tart pan, then quickly and gently use your fingers to press the dough into the tin’s crevices. For easy shaping, roll the dough one to two inches larger than your tart pan, then use a sharp paring knife to trim away the excess after you’ve shaped and chilled the dough in the tart pan.

Pay attention to the dough’s temperature. If the rolled dough is too warm, it will stick to the parchment. If it’s too cold, it will tear when you place it in the pan. Aim for something in between—it should be firm and cold enough to peel the parchment away easily, yet malleable enough to press into the pan without tearing or breaking. When in doubt, chill the dough until firm, then let it sit at room temperature for three to five minutes to let it soften ever so slightly before inverting it into the tart pan. If you’ve chilled the dough overnight, let it sit at room temperature for 10 minutes before flipping it onto the pan.

Use a tart pan with a removable bottom—then grease and flour it well. A tart pan with a removable bottom makes it much easier to lift the baked and cooled tart shell from the pan. I recommend lining the bottom of the tart pan with parchment, then coating it with nonstick spray and dusting it lightly with flour. If you’re using a ring or pan with flat sides (as opposed to fluted), you can line both the bottom and the sides with parchment strips instead of greasing and flouring it. 

There’s no need to weigh the pastry down when par-baking. To ensure that tart shells can withstand wet fillings like mousses or custards, pastry chefs often bake the shell before filling them. Typically, they line the shells with parchment paper, then weigh down the crust with dried beans, uncooked rice, or pie weights, which prevents it from shrinking as it bakes. In my testing, however, I found that pâte sablée tarts baked without weights were just as—if not even more—smooth, evenly baked, and visually appealing as those baked with weights.   

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