Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Samin Nosrat

      Cold-handed or not, consider temperature when you seek flakiness to create layers of developed gluten interspersed by pockets of fat. The warmer, and hence softer, your butter, the more readily it will combine with the flour. Because fat inhibits gluten development, the more intimately the two ingredients combine, the more tender—not flaky—a dough will be.

      To prevent gluten from developing, keep butter cold. This will protect the delicate bonds of its emulsion while you mix and roll dough. Butter contains about 15 to 20 percent water by weight. If butter softens and melts as it’s worked into the dough, its emulsion will break, releasing that water. Water droplets will bind with the flour, developing into long gluten strands that will cause the dough’s delicate layers to stick together. If they’re stuck together, they can’t steam apart and flake as they bake. The pastry will emerge from the oven chewy and elastic.

      Vegetable shortening (Trex, for example) is more forgiving of rising temperatures than butter and will remain in solid form even in a warm kitchen, but it just doesn’t taste as good. By the time it reaches body temperature, butter melts away, leaving behind its rich, satisfying flavour as the tongue’s lone souvenir. In contrast, the same chemical qualities that make shortening more stable at warm temperatures keep it from melting away at body temperature, leaving an unpleasant, plasticky residue on the tongue.

      I prefer not to sacrifice flavour for the forgiveness that shortening offers. There is a trade-off: certain measures must be taken to achieve a buttery pie crust flaky enough to shatter at the lightest touch of a fork. At home, chill the diced butter, flour, and tools in the freezer before you start, in order to encourage the butter to remain in distinct chunks even as you work it into the dough. Work quickly to reduce the threat of its softening. Don’t overmix. And finally, ensure that the dough spends plenty of time chilling in the fridge between the steps of mixing, rolling, assembling, and baking. I find it easiest to make pastry dough in advance and keep it tightly wrapped in the freezer, where it can stay for up to 2 months. That cuts out the most time-intensive step, freeing me to make and bake my pie when the fancy strikes.

      It’s important to slide the chilled, assembled pie directly into a preheated oven. In a hot oven, the water contained in the butter will quickly evaporate. The steam will push apart layers of dough as it expands with heat, yielding the flakes we so prize. If the oven’s not sufficiently hot, the water won’t evaporate and the crust won’t set before the filling seeps in, and the pie will emerge from the oven disappointingly soggy.

      Achieving Flakiness and Tenderness: Tart Dough

      Prone to bouts of overindulgence at the farmers’ market, I tend to find myself with more produce at any given moment than I know I can use up. (You try saying no to ripe Santa Rosa plums, perfectly sweet-tart nectarines, and juicy boysenberries, which always come into season on exactly the same day!) With an understanding of the science of fat, my friend Aaron Hyman sought to develop a tart dough that’s structured yet delicate. His ideal dough would stand up to mounds of juicy summer stone fruit but still yield flaky shards when bitten. He wanted a crust that would be both flaky and tender. And I wanted a crust that I could bake any time I had extra fruit on hand.

      First, he thought about how to achieve flakiness. He decided to keep everything cold, use large chunks of butter, and mix the dough just enough to form a small amount of gluten for the flaky layers. Then, to achieve tenderness, he selected liquid fats to bind the dough—cream and crème fraîche—and to coat the remaining loose flour with fat to prevent further gluten development.

      Aaron’s method is foolproof. I’ve always struggled with pastry dough, but his recipe leads me to success every time. With Aaron’s Tart Dough in the freezer, a regal dinner is always within reach. Stockpile several discs of dough for the moment when you want to invite friends over and have little more in the pantry than a basket of ageing onions, a Parmesan rind, and a can of anchovies. Or when you realise you’ve committed to bringing dessert to a party but doubt you have the time to make anything special. Or when you go a little overboard at the farmers’ market. Tart dough is the key to making something out of nothing.

      Tender Cakes

      For years I was disappointed by almost every single cake I tasted, whether I’d baked it myself or ordered it in a restaurant or bakery. I dreamed of a cake that was moist yet flavourful. So many cakes were one or the other: store-bought cake mixes yielded the texture I was after but were relatively flavourless, and cakes from fancy patisseries were rich in flavour but often dry or dense. I figured it was an either-or situation. And I resigned myself to it.

      Then I tasted a chocolate birthday cake so moist and rich that I nearly fainted from delight. For days, that slice of cake haunted me, so I begged my friend for the recipe. She called it Chocolate Midnight Cake, for how darkly rich it was, and when she shared the recipe, I noticed it was made with oil and water rather than butter. When I tasted the Fresh Ginger and Molasses Cake at Chez Panisse for the first time a few months later, I was stunned by its perfectly moist texture and deep, spicy flavour. I begged for its recipe, too, and noticed that it was eerily similar to my friend’s.

      There was something to these oil cakes. I flipped through my mental recipe box and realised that many of my favourite cakes, including classic carrot cake and olive oil cake, are made with oil instead of butter. Even cake