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Dessert

Plain Pastry

A simple pastry dough made with flour, butter, lard, salt, and ice cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Pastry

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix salt with flour in a large bowl.

  2. Cut in butter and lard using two knives or rub in with your fingers until well combined.

  3. Add ice cold water gradually, stirring with a knife until the mixture comes together.

  4. Keep all ingredients and utensils cold and work quickly.

  5. Ensure the dough is not too stiff; add more ice cold water if necessary.

Shape and store

  1. Roll out the dough, folding from the ends towards the center to create three layers.

  2. Use immediately or refrigerate for several hours or overnight.

  3. The pastry can be stored for three to four days but should not freeze.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the dough as gluten develops with water.
Butter
Cut into flour to create fat pockets that make the pastry tender and flaky.
Lard
Adds fat that shortens gluten strands, giving a tender, crumbly texture.
Ice cold water
Binds the flour and fat into a dough while keeping fat solid for flakiness.

The step that matters

Keep the fat and water cold. Cold butter and lard stay in solid pieces during mixing, and when they melt in the oven they leave steam pockets that create flakiness. Warm fat blends into the flour and makes the pastry dense and greasy.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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