How to make Chocolate Tart Crust
We all need a simple yet richly flavored chocolate crust. This recipe resulted from several experiments until I got what I wanted: deeply chocolate, easy to roll, good for pies, tarts, and cookies. A winner!
Ingredients
- 1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
- pinch salt
- ⅓ cup powdered sugar
- ½ cup unsalted butter cold and in small pieces
- 1 egg yolk
- ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
- ice water if needed, see Notes below
Instructions
In the food processor:
- Put 1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour, 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder, pinch salt and ⅓ cup powdered sugar in the bowl of the processor. Mix to combine.
- Add ½ cup unsalted butter in cubes and pulse a few times to mix. The butter should be the size of peas, roughly.
- Add 1 egg yolk and ½ teaspoon vanilla extract, if using, and pulse a few times until the mixture moistens. Be careful not to start making a ball.
By hand:
- Put 1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour, 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder, pinch salt and ⅓ cup powdered sugar in a large bowl and stir to combine.
- Scatter ½ cup unsalted butter in cubes on top. Use your hands or a pastry cutter to incorporate the butter into the flour until it's the size of peas.
- Add 1 egg yolk and ½ teaspoon vanilla extract if using, and mix with a fork until moistened. The dough will be irregular, as it's harder to incorporate it evenly by hand.
For both methods:
- Dump the shaggy mass onto a counter or working surface.
- Start bringing it together with your hands. At first, it will appear to never bind or come together properly. But it will. Keep turning it onto itself until you have a solid dough. If needed, add ice water , 1 teaspoon at a time to make a cohesive dough. See Notes below.
- Wrap it in a plastic or freezer bag and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. This is a crucial step for getting tender dough.
Rolling the dough:
- When ready to roll, take the dough from the fridge and let barely soften at room temperature. The dough must still be cold. Simply wait until you can start to roll it, but not until it is very soft. This is important to ensure a tender dough.
- On a lightly floured counter, start rolling the dough disc, making sure you do quarter turns (I do them to the left) often to ensure the dough is not sticking and adding more flour to the counter if it is sticking.
- Once you have the dough rolled a few inches larger than the pan, fold it in half and place the fold in the middle of the pan.
- Open the dough and line the pan, careful not to stretch the dough. Use your hands to lower the dough and reach the union between the bottom and sides of the pie pan.
- Go over the rim of the pan with the rolling pin to remove excess dough.
- Prick the bottom with a fork, freeze for 20 minutes, or put it in the refrigerator for 1 hour. At this point, you can leave the dough frozen in the pan for up to a month, wrapped in plastic.
- Or you can blind-bake it or bake it completely, depending on what you’re making. (Every pie or tart recipe in this blog has the steps to bake the pie crust. This post is about how to make and store the pastry).
Baking this dough:
- Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C).
- How to prepare a pie crust for blind baking: take the cold dough from the fridge or freezer.
- Cut a piece of aluminum paper that is larger than the tart pan. Line the inside of the pan by covering the cold dough with it and adjusting it so that it takes the shape of the dough. You can also use parchment paper, but it's usually coarser and more difficult to make it take the shape of the pan and cover the dough well.
- Add weight. I use round ceramic weights that you can buy online, but you can add any raw grains and legumes such as beans, lentils, rice or even flour (simply fill the aluminum paper with flour or rice or whatever you're using until you have added a layer of weight that will be enough to keep the paper down during baking
- Bake for 15 minutes. It might be a few minutes more or less, depending on the type of pie crust, but the idea is to let the dough bake and dry out enough so that we can lift the aluminum paper without it attaching to the raw dough. The paper should lift easily, and the dough below will be half-baked, very lightly golden. Fill and bake further following instructions in the recipe for the tart or pie you're making
- To completely bake the chocolate crust: first, follow the steps to blind bake it, above. After removing the paper and weight, return the pan to the oven and bake for another 10-15 minutes. The crust should be dry. Let cool on a wire rack.
- If fully baked it will keep for a few days in a metal tin or at room temperature if the place is dry and cool. But I suggest you bake it the day you’re filling it.
Notes
Powdered sugar: it acts very differently than regular sugar, making the crust smoother, so don't substitute it.
Ice water: this recipe doesn't use liquid, and though it might seem like the dough will never come together into a ball, it does. However, making it by hand might be harder to form into a ball as the butter distributes differently than when using the food processor. Add ice water (put some ice cubes in a glass, cover with water, and use the cold water), a teaspoon at a time; it will help everything bind. Don't add too much that you end up with a wet dough.