Directions

• Please note that this recipe makes enough pastry dough for the top and bottom crusts of a 25-cm / 10 inch tart or pie. Leftover single-crust amounts of dough can be wrapped up in clingfilm/plastic wrap and frozen.
  

• Measure out 150g of a wholemeal / whole wheat flour...

  

• ...and 150g of plain white flour. (You don't need to use bread flour for this.) Combine the flours together in a single bowl, and add the salt.
  

  

• Then weigh out 75g of butter (and a bit, maybe. An extra gram won't hurt anybody)...

  

• ...and 75 grams of lard, cubed (if your lard is hard enough) or by spoonfuls. (If lard's not available for you, just use a similar amount of butter or your other preferred solid cooking fat.) 

  

• Add these fats to the flour mixture and start using paired knives or a pastry blender to cut them into the flour.

  

• Here we're about halfway through the cutting-in process. (This would be a good time to stop if you were making rough-puff pastry.) But you should continue cutting in the shortenings until the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal.

  

• When the fats have been cut into the dough sufficiently, add about half the water and mix well. Then add a little more water at a time and keep mixing the dough until it just comes together into a ball.

  Press the dough together and then put it into the refrigerator to rest for at least thirty minutes, either wrapped in plastic wrap or in a covered bowl.

  

• When you're ready to line your pie pan / tin, lightly flour your work surface and put the ball of dough on it. If you're making a two-crust pie, cut the dougb into a piece that's about 2/3 of the dough (for your bottom crust), and another one that contains about 1/3 of the dough (which will be your top crust).

  

• Bash the bottom crust piece on your floured work surface with the rolling pin to flatten it out a little.

  

• Then roll it out into a round.

  

• Check the size of the round against the size of your baking pan.

  

• To quickly and easily move your rolled out dough onto and into the pan: drape it over your rolling pin...

  

• ...and then lift it onto the pan and slide the rolling pin out from underneath.

  

• Once this is done, pat the crust gently into shape against the baking pan. You don't have to force it: a gentle shaping is fine.

  

• Finally, before filling, roll your rolling pin over the top of the tart pan to trim away the excess dough and neaten everything up.

  

• You can then fill the pastry case with your preferred filling (as you see has been done below).

  Never fill it all the way up to the top: the filling will inevitably going to expand in the baking process. Make sure to leave it room to do that.