How to Make Pâte Sucrée: Classic Pâte Sucrée Recipe

Pâte sucrée (French for “sugary dough”) is a type of French pastry dough made with egg yolks, butter, flour, and sugar. The flaky shortcrust pastry is typically used as a pie crust for fruit tarts and other sweet desserts. Pâte sucrée is traditionally made by hand or directly on a work surface, but you can also use a food processor or stand mixer to bring the dough together. The dough is then blind baked in a tart pan with a removable bottom until golden brown, crispy.

The most common way to use pâte sucrée is to make tart shells by pressing the dough into tart pans and blind baking (baking with pie weights or dried beans instead of a filling). If you blind bake the tart dough, you can then fill it with ingredients that don’t require baking: pastry cream or custard for a French fruit tart, or chocolate ganache, caramel sauce, and flaky sea salt for added decadence.

Pâte sucrée and pâte sablée share similar ingredients and are both used as tart shells in French baking, but there are a couple of notable differences between the two shortcut pastries.

• Pâte sablée is harder to work with. To make pâte sablée dough, bakers cream together butter and powdered sugar before adding eggs and dry ingredients, much like cookie dough. The shortcut pastry dough is known for its delicate, shortbread crumble. Almond flour is typically added to pâte sablée to create a finer, crumbly texture. This texture makes the dough more difficult to work with than its pâte sucrée counterpart.
• Pâte sucrée is sweeter. To make pâte sucrée, bakers cream together butter, granulated sugar, and eggs before incorporating dry ingredients. The recipe for pâte sucrée contains more sugar than pâte sablée and does not feature almond flour.