Fraisage

To achieve flaky pastry for your pies and tarts, you need to sandwich long, flat sheets of butter within your pastry or pie dough. When the rolled-out dough pastry or pie goes into a hot oven, the liquid in the butter turns to steam, which causes the dough to puff up, creating a network of little flaky pockets within the pastry. I use a French technique called fraisage to achieve the sandwiched butter: Dump the dough in a mound onto a work surface. Using the palm of your hand, smear the barely mixed dough (chunks of butter should still be punctuating it) along the work surface, smooshing the butter into long streaks as you go. Smear through all of the dough, moving through each part of the mound, until the whole mess has been smeared into a cohesive mass with long streaks of butter. If the dough still seems shaggy and not well mixed, smear the whole mound again.