# Yeast in shortcrust ?



## potsnpans (May 1, 2012)

Hope someone here can enlighten me.

Although I'm a relative newbie to the pastry biz, I thought I'd seen most of the common variations on the old pâte sucrée theme.

Until today. Perusing a through a new acquisition to my library during some rare time-off, I encounter a recipe with a specific "rich shortcrust pastry" that calls for 5g of powdered yeast. /img/vbsmilies/smilies/eek.gif

What's going on there then ? I've seen innumerable patsuc recipes in books from the Pierre Hermé type league downwards and have never seen yeast used in this context ... I've even tried googling, but even that doesn't yield much of an answer either !

(The book in question is Cresci - The art of leavened dough. The recipe is for lemon tart, and this pastry is just being used as a tart shell in a ring , nothing fancy. The book has a few other tart ideas, but none of them ask for yeast ! )

Looking forward to your wise words of wisdom.


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## michaelga (Jan 30, 2012)

is it used just for flavouring? ie. nutritional yeast?

sounds kinda... weird

it might be a translation error..


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## potsnpans (May 1, 2012)

Possibly flavouring, I guess.... but the dough already has lemon zest, honey, egg yolk, whole egg in there.   But then again, at 0.5% of flour weight, it's not going to provide much rise either.

The only other reference I've found to yeast in pastry so far is in relation to Coulibac. Which is a Russian dish, essentially salmon en-croute.  But instead of puff or rough-puff, it traditionally uses a yeasted dough to yield a flaky pastry.   But then that dough has a fair proportion of milk in it (as well as butter), whilst mine only has the butter as dairy.


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## potsnpans (May 1, 2012)

For those who are interested, I tracked down Ignio Massari and got the answer from the horse's mouth......

MichaelGA guessed correctly. Mistake in translation. Should have read baking powder, not yeast.

Somewhat disappointing for me though, I thought I might have uncovered some new secret to even better pastry ! /img/vbsmilies/smilies/frown.gif


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## coyote (Apr 4, 2012)

Maybe you should try it anyway, just to see what happens.. ?? LOL.. always fun to try a new experiment.


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## michaelga (Jan 30, 2012)

Glad it's figured out...hope it helps others.

Might give it a whirl just for s'n'g


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## tomb (May 17, 2014)

In " Fabulous Fanny Craddock" 2007 by Clive Ellis, there is a reproduced advert for "Bake-a-Cake" self-raising flour -- 1950s style( which no longer exists, I think ! ) in which the recommended pastry for real Cornish pasties is a Yeast dough pastry. I read the book today and must say that this stuck in my mind because I've never heard of this kind of dough except for Danish-style pastries. 

  If you gain any other info. please let me know.

Cheers

Tom


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