Hard to Work With Dough

If you've ever worked with really glutinous dough, you know what a pain it is to prevent the dough from shrinking once you get it in the pan. Well, at the bakery, I work with a quiche dough that is just that. It's made with flour, water, and butter. Any time the dough is rolled, stretched, or basically manipulated in a way that doesn't let it sit peacefully on it's own, the dough acts up. How? By trying to shrink back to it's original self. This makes it an absolute nightmare when you try to put the dough in pan shells and once you cut the dough from the edges, it starts to shrink away and then down. If the dough doesn't stick to the edges, it will continue to shrink down as it bakes, which become more horrible since there will be filling in the quiche shells.

Anyways, I decided to make a similar dough at home to show in case if any of you ever work with a really glutinous dough. I feel this technique works in any instance, because it's really been adapted for exactly these types of doughs.

1. First off, do not treat these types of doughs like you do a pie dough. With pie dough, you press the dough up the sides and then cut it off using the edge of the pie tin. With more glutinous dough, roll it out so that it is slightly bigger that your pie tin. I'll show you in the next step why that will be beneficial. The first major thing you do is make an actual crease where the sides of the pan meet the bottom. This helps the edges from sliding down because everything is stable and tucked into the edges on the bottom.

2. Now with the extra dough that is hanging off the sides, roll them inward sort of like an accordion.

3. You can see that even after rolling the dough inward, you still want it to be slightly taller than the edge. The thicker you want the crust, the more "bulky" you want these inward rolls to be.

4. I took a picture of this to show what happens if you use your thumb and try to cut off the dough. Even with all the work we did, the edges still separate from the dough.

5. Here's the second most important thing to do after making the crease in the dough. Instead of moving the dough horizontally and cutting it off with your thumb, push your dough DOWN as you are cutting it with your thumb and the edge of the pie tin. Obviously you do have to move the dough horizontally a bit as you cut the dough, but the important motion is pushing the dough down. Stretchy glutinous doughs seem to adjust better when they are squished rather than stretched. And I leave the excess dough on the edge until I do the whole pie tin so that the dough has time to rest before I tear off the dough.

6. As you push down the dough, the edges do get thicker versus if you were just to cut it off at the edge. So remember as you use your thumb to push down, also use your middle or index finger on your other hand to adjust the thickness of the edges. With this method, even your most glutinous doughs won't try to stretch back and shrink.