French pastry doughs
For years I bought ready-made pastry, convinced that homemade dough needed skills I simply didn’t have. Then one afternoon I was in my neighbour’s kitchen while she was cooking, and she started making what looked like pastry. She was chatting away while her hands worked butter into flour, no recipe book in sight, barely looking at what she was doing.
“What’s that?” I asked. “Pâte brisée. For a quiche.” She said it like it was nothing. Five minutes of rubbing butter into flour while telling me about her week, a splash of water, done. “Nothing beats a homemade quiche with homemade pastry,” she said. She was right.
Later that day she texted me the ingredients. Flour, butter, salt, water. I’d been buying something for years that turned out to be four ingredients and five minutes of work.
That got me thinking about the rest of the French pastry doughs. A tart dough isn’t the same as a quiche dough, and sweet tarts use something else again. Once you know which dough does which job, and why, the whole thing clicks.
Table of Contents
The one rule behind every French pastry dough: keep the butter cold
Before we get into the doughs themselves, here’s the thing that makes all of it work. French pastry is basically a battle against melting butter.
Butter doesn’t melt at one exact temperature. It softens gradually as it warms and is fully liquid somewhere around 32 to 35°C (90 to 95°F), which is uncomfortably close to the temperature of your hands. Your kitchen is probably warm too, especially in summer.
So the French solution is simple: keep everything cold. Chill the bowl, keep the butter in the fridge until the last minute, work quickly, rest the dough often, and when in doubt, put it back in the fridge for twenty minutes. Every tip below comes back to this.
A quick note on butter itself. French butter has to contain at least 82% fat, while standard US butter can be as low as 80%. That small difference means less water, which makes pastry easier to handle and gives a better flake. If you’re in the US, a European-style butter is worth it here. In the UK, most supermarket butter is already in the right range.
And weigh your ingredients. Pastry is chemistry, and a kitchen scale takes all the guesswork out of it!
Pâte brisée: the everyday shortcrust pastry dough
Pâte brisée is the simplest of the French pastry doughs and the one French home cooks make without thinking. It’s the closest thing France has to a classic shortcrust pastry dough, but it’s slightly richer, and it’s the base under almost every quiche you’ll eat in France. This is the one I learned from my neighbour.
It’s sturdy enough to hold a proper quiche filling and tender enough that it never tastes of cardboard. It’s also barely sweet at all, which makes it the go-to for anything savoury.
The technique is called sablage: you rub cold butter into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs, then bring it together with cold water. Temperature is everything, and the rest in the fridge before rolling is non-negotiable.
Ratio to remember
2 parts flour to 1 part butter, with just enough water to bring it together (about a fifth of the flour weight).
1
Shortcrust Pastry (Pate Brisée)
Pâte brisée is crisp, buttery, and just neutral enough to work with almost anything, from sweet tarts, savoury quiches, to tartlets and tourtes. It takes about ten minutes to make. The technique matters more than the recipe, and once you've got it, you've got it for life.
Get the recipe →
What pâte brisée is used for
Quiche Lorraine
Mini quiches
Lemon Tartlets
Easter Quiche
Mini Quiches Salmon Courgettes
Leek Tart with Lardons
Tarte Tatin
Plum tarts
Pear & blue cheese tart
Thin asparagus tart
Cheese tart
Apple tarts
Goat’s cheese & honey tart
Mediterranean vegetable tart
Pâte sablée: the crumbly sweet short crust
Sablée means “sandy”, and the name describes both the method and the result. Pâte sablée is a rich, sweet short crust with more butter than pâte brisée, a fine, sandy crumb, and a texture that melts in your mouth rather than snapping. It tastes a lot like shortbread, which is no coincidence: the same dough is used to make sablé biscuits (shortbread cookies).
Like pâte brisée, it’s made by sablage, rubbing cold butter into the dry ingredients before adding the egg. That’s the detail many recipes get wrong. If you cream soft butter with the sugar first, you’re technically making pâte sucrée instead (more on that below).
Because it’s so short and crumbly, pâte sablée is less suited to heavy, wet fillings. It’s at its best under fruit, creams and fillings that set in the fridge. It’s also notoriously fragile to roll out, so don’t panic if it tears.
Ratio to remember
Roughly 3 parts flour to 2 parts butter to 1 part sugar.
2
Sweet Shortcrust Pastry (Pâte Sablée)
Buttery, lightly sweet, sandy and crumbly. This French sweet shortcrust pastry tastes like a delicate shortbread biscuit and melts in your mouth instead of shattering. This is the base for almost every classic French tart.
Get the recipe →
What pâte brisée is used for
Tarte au Citron
Salted Caramel Chocolate Tartlets
Savoury biscuits
Blueberry Tart
Tarte Bourdaloue
Strawberry Tart
Plum Tart with Frangipane
Petits sablés
Vegetable tartlets
Pepper and walnut sablés
Tarte amandine
Alsatian fruit tart
Peach tart
Herbed shortbread
Rhubarb tart
A little bit of France in your inbox
Once a month, I’ll write to you with recipes, French cheeses, a few tips and little stories from the neighbourhood. And you’ll get my Mother Sauces e-book free, straight away!
Pâte sucrée: the crisp sweet tart shell
This is what you see in patisserie windows: tart shells with clean, straight edges that hold their shape perfectly, crisp and sweet with a fine crumb. Pâte sucrée is pâte sablée’s more disciplined sibling, and bakeries use it precisely because it behaves so reliably.
The ingredients are very close to pâte sablée. The real difference is the method. Pâte sucrée is made by crémage: you cream soft butter with the sugar first, then add egg, then flour. That gives a smoother, more compact dough that’s easier to roll and line a tin with, and it bakes up crisper and firmer.
You’ll find French pastry chefs who argue about where exactly the line sits between sablée and sucrée, and recipes overlap a lot. For home baking, this is the useful version: sablage for sablée, crémage for sucrée.
Ratio to remember
2 parts flour to 1 part butter to just under 1 part sugar.
Ingredients
– 250g plain flour
– 125g soft butter
– 100g icing sugar
– 50g egg
– 1 pinch of salt
Sometimes vanilla or almond extract
The method
The difference between sablée and sucrée isn’t just the sugar type, it’s the mixing method that creates a completely different structure.
- Beat the soft butter and icing sugar for three to four minutes, until pale and fluffy. Don’t rush this. You’re changing the structure of the dough.
- Add the egg bit by bit, beating well between each addition. If it looks curdled, the egg was too cold. Keep beating and it will come back together.
- Tip in all the flour at once and mix gently with a spatula, or on the slowest mixer speed, until it just comes together. Overworking is the enemy here too.
- Wrap and chill. This dough likes a long rest, and overnight in the fridge is ideal.
- Roll it between two sheets of baking paper, always from the centre outwards. If it cracks, patch it with a scrap of dough. Nobody will ever know.
What pâte brisée is used for
Red fruit tartlets
Tartelettes au chocolat
Apple Tart
Tarte framboises, vanille
Flan pâtissier
Tarte Amandine aux nectarines
Tarte café
Pâte Feuilletée: the flaky puff pastry dough
Finally, pâte feuilletée, better known as puff pastry. Feuilleté means “leafed”, which describes the hundreds of thin, buttery layers that rise dramatically in the oven. It’s one of the great achievements of French baking and it asks for real patience.
Puff pastry works differently from everything above. Instead of rubbing butter into flour, you wrap a whole slab of cold butter in a simple dough (called the détrempe) and then roll and fold it again and again. Each set of folds is called a tour, or turn. In the oven, the water in the butter turns to steam and pushes the layers apart.
The classic version has six turns. Each turn folds the dough in three, so the layers of butter go from 3 to 9, 27, 81, 243 and finally 729. That’s the number every French pastry student learns.
My honest advice? Make puff pastry once, just to understand the craft. Then do what most French home cooks do and buy it ready-made (see below for what to look for).
Ingredients
– 250g flour
– 200g cold butter
– 125ml cold water
– 5g of salt
– 25g butter, melted
The method
- Make the détrempe. Mix the flour, salt, water and melted butter until it comes together. It won’t be smooth at this stage, and that’s fine. Knead it briefly, form a ball, cut a cross on top to help it relax, wrap it and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
- Make the butter block. Put the cold butter between two sheets of baking paper and bash it with a rolling pin into a 15cm (6 inch) square about 1cm (⅜ inch) thick. You want it pliable but still cold. The dough and the butter should have roughly the same consistency, or the butter will either crack or squash out.
- Wrap the butter. Roll the dough into a 30cm (12 inch) square. Place the butter block in the middle at an angle, like a diamond, then fold the corners of the dough over it like wrapping a parcel. Seal the edges.
- First two turns. Roll the parcel out to about 60 x 20cm (24 x 8 inches). Fold it in three like a letter. Turn it 90 degrees, roll it out again and fold it again. That’s two turns. Wrap it, press two fingertips into it so you remember where you’re at, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
- Four more turns. Do two more turns, chill for 30 minutes, then two final turns. Refrigerate overnight before using.Make the détrempe. Mix the flour, salt, water and melted butter until it comes together. It won’t be smooth at this stage, and that’s fine. Knead it briefly, form a ball, cut a cross on top to help it relax, wrap it and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
- Make the butter block. Put the cold butter between two sheets of baking paper and bash it with a rolling pin into a 15cm (6 inch) square about 1cm (⅜ inch) thick. You want it pliable but still cold. The dough and the butter should have roughly the same consistency, or the butter will either crack or squash out.
- Wrap the butter. Roll the dough into a 30cm (12 inch) square. Place the butter block in the middle at an angle, like a diamond, then fold the corners of the dough over it like wrapping a parcel. Seal the edges.
- First two turns. Roll the parcel out to about 60 x 20cm (24 x 8 inches). Fold it in three like a letter. Turn it 90 degrees, roll it out again and fold it again. That’s two turns. Wrap it, press two fingertips into it so you remember where you’re at, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
- Four more turns. Do two more turns, chill for 30 minutes, then two final turns. Refrigerate overnight before using.
What puff pastry is used for
Galette des Rois
Banana Tarte Tatin
Smoked salmon appetizers
Leek Tart Tatin
Millefeuille
Palmiers
Apple turnovers
Bastelle Corse
Dorade en croûte feuilletée
Vol-au-vents
Feuillantine comtoise
Tarte soleil
Six turns, three chilling sessions and an overnight rest. That’s why most French home cooks buy it.
Buying puff pastry: what to look for
Ready-made puff pastry is perfectly respectable in France. Every supermarket sells it in rolls, and plenty of very good cooks never make their own. The thing that matters is the fat.
In France, look for “pur beurre” (all butter) on the pack. In the US, Dufour Pastry Kitchens is the widely recommended all-butter brand, and Trader Joe’s sells an all-butter version seasonally, while Pepperidge Farm, the one in most supermarkets, is made with vegetable fats. In the UK, look for “all butter” on the label, which Jus-Rol and several supermarket own brands offer. Check the ingredients list: butter should come before any oil, or ideally be the only fat.
Is croissant dough puff pastry?
Not quite, and it’s a common mix-up. Croissants and pains au chocolat use pâte levée feuilletée, a laminated dough built on the same folding principle but with yeast in the détrempe. The yeast makes it rise before and during baking, so you get a softer, bready, honeycombed inside instead of the crisp, shattering layers of puff pastry. It usually contains a bit of sugar and milk too. Same family, different dough.
Bonus: Pizza dough
Not French, obviously, but French families make pizza all the time, and every French home cook has a go-to dough. It’s also the opposite of everything above: no butter, no battle with temperature, just flour, water, yeast, salt and time. Patience with the rise is what builds the flavour and the texture, a chewy crumb with slightly crisp edges.
Ingredients
– 500g bread flour
– 325ml lukewarm water
– 7g instant yeast
(or 20g fresh)
– 10g salt
– 30ml olive oil
The method
- Mix the flour and water only. Don’t knead yet. Leave it for 30 minutes. This rest, called autolyse, makes the dough much easier to work with.
- Add everything else and knead for about 10 minutes by hand, or five minutes in a mixer, until smooth and stretchy. It will be quite wet and sticky. Resist adding more flour.
- Put it in an oiled bowl, cover and leave for an hour. Every 20 minutes, wet your hand and fold the dough over itself four times. This builds structure without more kneading.
- Divide it into three or four balls. Now the best part: put them in the fridge for one to three days. The flavour improves a lot with time.
- Take them out an hour before using and stretch from the centre outwards, keeping the edges thicker for the crust.
What pizza dough is used for
Pizza and panzerotti
Flatbreads
Focaccia
Fougasse, the leaf-shaped Provençal bread
Breadsticks
Lentil pide
Which pastry dough for which job?
If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this table.
| Dough | Texture | Sweetness | Sturdiness |
| Pâte Brisée | Crumbly, tender, slightly firm | Not sweet | Sturdy |
| Pâte Sablée | Sandy, rich, crumbly, melts in mouth | Sweet | Delicate, crumbly |
| Pâte Sucrée | Crisp, buttery, holds shape very well | Sweet | Firm |
| Pâte Feuilletée | Flaky, buttery, many layers, light | Not sweet | Light and flaky |
| Pizza Dough | Chewy, elastic, slightly crispy edges | Not sweet | Sturdy but flexible |
How to store pastry dough
All of these doughs keep well, which is why making a double batch is a smart move. The effort is the same, and future you will be very grateful.
Raw dough
- Fridge: up to 3 days for all four French pastry doughs, and 1 to 3 days for pizza dough
- Freezer: up to 3 months
- Wrap it twice, first in cling film (plastic wrap), then in foil or a freezer bag
- Defrost overnight in the fridge, never on the counter, so the butter stays cold
Blind-baked tart shells
- Room temperature: up to 2 days in an airtight container
- Freezer: up to 2 months. Freeze them in the tin first so they keep their shape, then wrap.
FAQ
What are the four main French pastry doughs?
The four classic French pastry doughs are pâte brisée, pâte sablée, pâte sucrée and pâte feuilletée. Pâte brisée is a plain shortcrust used for quiches and savoury tarts. Pâte sablée is a rich, crumbly sweet short crust. Pâte sucrée is a crisp, sweet dough for neat tart shells. Pâte feuilletée is puff pastry, made by folding butter into dough to create hundreds of layers.
Is pâte brisée the same as shortcrust pastry?
Very nearly. Both are made by rubbing butter into flour and binding it with water, and both are used for savoury pies and tarts. A typical British shortcrust uses half fat to flour, often with some lard or vegetable fat, while pâte brisée is all butter and frequently includes an egg yolk. The result is slightly richer and more tender, but you can use them interchangeably.
What’s the difference between pâte sablée and pâte sucrée?
The ingredients are similar, so the main difference is the method. Pâte sablée is made by rubbing cold butter into the flour and sugar (sablage), which gives a sandy, crumbly, fragile texture. Pâte sucrée is made by creaming soft butter with sugar before adding egg and flour (crémage), which gives a smoother dough that’s easier to roll and bakes into a crisp shell that holds its shape.
Is croissant dough the same as puff pastry dough?
No. Croissants use pâte levée feuilletée, a laminated dough made with the same folding technique as puff pastry but with yeast added to the base dough. The yeast makes croissants soft and airy inside, while puff pastry rises only from steam and bakes into crisp, flaky layers. You can’t swap one for the other in a recipe and get the same result.
Is store-bought puff pastry any good?
Yes, as long as it’s made with butter. Most French home cooks buy their puff pastry, and an all-butter version gives you most of the flavour and flake of homemade for none of the work. Check the label for “pur beurre” in France or “all butter” in the UK and US, and make sure butter is the main fat rather than vegetable oil or shortening.
Can you freeze pastry dough?
Yes. Raw pâte brisée, pâte sablée, pâte sucrée and puff pastry dough all freeze well for up to three months if you wrap them twice, first in cling film and then in foil or a freezer bag. Defrost overnight in the fridge. Blind-baked tart shells freeze for about two months; freeze them in the tin first so they keep their shape.
Over to you
So, that’s the lowdown on French pastry doughs. Four ingredients, five minutes, and a quiche that tastes better than anything from a packet. I still buy puff pastry, and I’m not even slightly sorry about it. Do you make your own pastry, or are you firmly in the shop-bought camp?
This post may contain affiliate links. If you buy through them I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and it helps keep this blog running. Please read my disclosure policy for more information. I am grateful for your support.
