The Secret to Last-Minute Tart: Keep Pastry Dough in the Freezer

If I have a sweet pastry shell in the freezer, I know I’m ready to entertain. A dinner party requires a dessert, and what is more pleasing than a beautiful fruit or lemon tart?

I finally got the hang of pastry a few years ago, when I worked as a collaborator on the pastry chef Jacquy’s Pfeiffer’s book, “The Art of French Pastry.” Before that, I was never sure how well it would go with my dough. Would it crack as I rolled it out? Would it bake evenly? Would it shrink or sink in the pan?

With a chapter of tart recipes to test for the book, I had to make a lot of dough. Each batch of dough was enough for two tarts, and that’s when the bell went off: I would make pastry for one tart and freeze the other half. When the holidays came around, I still had dough from my recipe tests in the freezer, so making a couple of tarts for Christmas dinner was a no-brainer. From then on, I made it a habit to keep frozen dessert pastry on hand, tucked into the pan and ready to prebake.

Mastering tart pastry takes some practice, mainly to get a feel for rolling out the dough. But first, eliminate the variables: Always weigh your ingredients, in grams, instead of measuring them by volume, and invest in a large silicone-coated mat, which provides a nonstick surface for rolling out the dough. Also buy two 9-inch tart pans with removable bottoms. That way you can roll out both of the crusts that one recipe makes, use one right away and double-wrap the other for the freezer.

The only way to master rolling out dough is to just do it. The action is gentle and even, brisk but not hard; you are working against time, because you want the dough to remain cold, but if you press down too hard, the dough will stick. The more you practice, the easier it will become. If, with all this practice, you have more pastry rounds than tart pans, just double-wrap and freeze them. The flat rounds don’t take up much space, and pie dough is something you can’t have too much of.