Pâte Brisée

This is the classic crust, both in contents and method, for French tarts and many other types of pastry. Except for the egg yolk, it is not very different from a standard American pie-crust dough. In other words, this is a short dough, heavy on the butter, but not so heavy on the sugar that it would qualify as a pâte sucrée. Pâte brisée means broken dough, probably because butter is broken into tiny pieces during the kneading and rolling processes. The result is a fairly smooth, “mea