FOOD NEWS
Paul Hollywood's Pastry Mistake To Avoid When Making Chicken Pot Pie
BY MATTHEW SPINA
In a YouTube video, Paul Hollywood says that "hot hands" being a problem for pastry is a myth because you shouldn't be handling your dough long enough for that to matter.
"If you play with the dough too much, it will heat up, and it will go like rubber," says Hollywood as he quickly folds shredded butter into his crust dough.
Butter is essential to the texture of pie dough, but it gets soft at relatively low temperatures (around 70 degrees F), where it has the exact opposite effect of cold butter.
Soft butter will mix with flour and coat the molecules, preventing them from binding, and that creates a solid mass of dough that's crumbly instead of well-structured and layered.
Therefore, making sure your butter and dough are both cold before you fold them together is essential. Even chilled butter can melt quickly, so be sure to work fast.