175 g (6 oz) plain (all-purpose)
flour
130 g (4½ oz) unsalted butter,
cold and sliced into small tiles
2 cm (¾ in) square and 5 mm
(¼ in) thick
3 g (¹⁄₁₀ oz/heaped ¼ teaspoon)
fine sea salt
60 g/ml (2 oz) iced water
Brisee butter crust
Just when you thought your pastry arsenal was locked and
loaded, here is a crust that is unflinchingly fine and flaky. The
utter butter magic happens when you use this lovely controlled
smearing technique called ‘fraisage’ (how romance!), creating
fine shard-like strata of butter through the dough. When those
shards melt, they gift you the finest flake that ever touched your
tongue. Don’t be like me as an apprentice, thinking the dry-ish
dough needed extra water to come together. It doesn’t. It only
needs your pushy palms.

Brisee means ‘broken’, which is how I hope you won’t end up
after making this dough, especially in a warm kitchen. Chill the
flour before mixing and begin with butter tiles – an easier shape
to flake than cubes.

I use this crust equally for sweet and savoury baking – don’t
ever feel beholden to the cliché of crusts: sweet pastry for a sweet
filling. There can be a lovely balance when a sweet inside meets
a non-sweet crust. Maybe don’t go the other way though, that’s
a little weird.

Lightly toss the flour, butter tiles and salt together in a wide mixing
bowl and chill for 30 minutes. Then break and flake the butter pieces
between your fingers while tossing with the flour until the butter
pieces are the size of a thick thumbnail. The flour will have taken on
just the faintest yellow hue. Scatter the water over the flour/butter mix
and lightly toss through – it won’t look like anything has changed with
the mix but the smear (fraisage) will really bring the dough together.

Tip the crumbly dry flour/butter mix onto your work surface and make
a pile which we will call pile A. Imagine pile A is sitting at 4 o’clock
on a clock face. Using the taut heel of your palm, smear the dough
20 cm (8 in) away from the pile, across the bench to 11 o’clock to
form pile B. The smearing will start to cohere the dough. Employ your
non-smearing hand to stop the back end of the dough from scattering
back away from the starting pile.

continued …

Keeps Frozen and unbaked for

3 months, covered, in the freezer.

After being baked, airtight at room
temperature for about 4 days. I leave
the foil in from blind baking as a cover.

Makes 370 g (13 oz). Enough for one

23–24 cm (9–9½ in) fluted loose- bottomed
tart tin/single-crusted 24 cm
(9½ in) pie dish/6 shallow individual
tart tins 12 cm (4¾ in) in diameter.

Takes 20 minutes to make the dough.

Chill overnight for best results.

pile A
pile B