The Egg Tarts Project

Experiment #3 August 11, 2008

I did this experiment two weeks ago, but didn’t get around to writting it up until now.

This experiment is actually two experiments:

For water dough I made 2 portions with the same formula as in experiment #2.

Then I made 2 oil dough formula:

Formula #1:

Flour 25%(as compared to the amount of a single portion of water dough)

Butter 150%

Formular #2:

Flour 25%(as compared to the amount of a single portion of water dough)

Butter 112.5%

Lard 37.5%

Then I made two set of LPS, each using a single portion of the waterdough, and one of the oil dough.

Why was I trying to figure out?

As I mentioned before, I didn’t understand why so much flour was used in the oil dough, that’s why I reduced the amount of flour in the dough.

The test with butter vs. butter/lard mixture was just so that I can see for myself, the difference on the end product in terms of layer separation, aroma, etc.

Results:

Experiment #3

As you can guess, the tart shell turned out a lot more like puff pastry, however, since I use high heat(260C) in the beginning, the layers were essentially fried and turned crunchy.   It was interesting tasting it, definitely something I didn’t expect.

More importantly though, I finally understood the reason that flour was mixed in.  The intent is to create layers of crumbly crust that’s laminated by layers of flaky ones.   Knowing this is the case, using pastry flour in the oil dough makes a lot of sense.  Also, it tells me that in the future, when I mix the oil dough, I should not completely mix everything together as I’ve been doing, I should do it more like short pastry so that gluten development is at a minimum.

The butter vs. lard was less informative, simply because the oil dough was wrong to begin with.  But I can get from the result that all butter does provide a much better aroma, but one with lard mixed int raised higher.  The question is, which is more important to me?   That’s something I need to continue experimenting with in the future for sure.