How to make sweet pastry

Ok hi everybody, what we’re doing today is baking sweet pastry or pate sable there's various different forms, names, obviously these different elements to it but this is a generic method, what we have here, is we have 200 grams of butter, 160 grams of icing sugar, we have 300 grams of soft flour, 2 grams of salt, 50 grams of eggs and 30 gram of yolks, one vanilla pod and a 100 grams of ground almonds.

So we start by putting our sugar into our bowl, we add our butter up and we just place that into the machine with the paddle, I just want a creaming method I just want to lightly cream it, I don’t want to fully cream it and make it light, white and fluffy like we’re making a cake, we are making a pastry so again maintain it on speed one, turn the machine on just bring the sugar and then the butter to a paste, so it’s not aerated too much but it’s incorporated, what we can do while we're waiting is if we take our vanilla pod and sometimes their a little bit dry from the fridge so all you do is just pop it in the microwave for a few seconds, not to long and all that does is warm it up slightly so it gets the oils going, smells already, so just take your knife run it down the back and then just take out all the seeds, open it up and take all the seeds out and place that with our eggs and now that’s all going to go in, this don’t throw away what you can do is just put it into some sugar or you can dry it out in the oven and blend it down and you get vanilla powder or you’ve got vanilla sugar.

Now our butter and sugar has come together but we just want to take it all off the beater because it has a tendency to stick around the beater head and it doesn’t necessarily incorporate properly so just take it off the beater, so what we have here is the egg yolk and the egg I’m going to lightly beat that with the vanilla so that it distributes the vanilla a little bit, because it has a tendency to clump, our sugar and our butter are creamed together just lightly and we just slowly drizzle through the egg, again allowing it come together so it doesn’t split, we take our flour and our almonds and we’re just going to sieve that through, so use the length of the paper so you don't end up all at one end, our almonds can go over there, gather it all up and then just gently feed it into the machine take your time, we don’t want lumps we just want to bring it together to make a nice smooth paste, maintain that piece of paper on your bench.

Ok so you’ve got your paper which you have just used to place your almonds out on and your flour mix out on, take all the paste which isn’t quite mixed and just it a final mix just making sure you get those last bit’s of almond and flour from the base and onto your paper, two ways you can do this you can either just pack it how it is or what we like to do take another piece of paper and place it on top, just press it or roll it into a semi-form so nice and thin, not pushing too hard so it sets quickly, you just place that on a tray and then rest that in the fridge.

Okay so what we are going to do now is just remove the pastry from the fridge so we can just see how it is after it’s chilled, just take that out, we’ve rolled it up so it’s nice and hard and now we can package it ready for the freezer and there you have our finished pastry ready for the fridge or freezer, you can just store it like this or sheet it and cut it into the required shapes.

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