Pineapple Tarts Again! (Part Two)

This is the part two of my recent pineapple tart experimental baking.
 
In my previous post , I have tabulated and compared three pineapple tart recipes by standardising their butter content to 100g in order to have a better understanding their differences. Using my homemade pineapple jam, I have baked the tarts and let's see the result...

Here are the interesting characteristics, pros and cons of the three recipes used:

One from Mandy of Fresh from the Oven
This recipe uses creaming method to cream butter and egg yolk before mixing in the dry ingredients.
Pros - The pastry dough is easy to handle even at room temperature.
Cons - The baked tarts are quite fragile and require careful handling when stacking them into the cookie jars. As shown in Mandy's post, hers were the enclosed ones and I reckon the enclosed ones might be tougher to handle than the open-faced ones.

Two from Alvina of Alvina's Baking Journey
This recipe uses rubbing-in method and contains milk powder to create a nice melt-in-the mouth effect.
Pros - True enough that the pastry of these tarts does melt-in-the-mouth with a little extra milky taste. Good that this recipe can be used to make both enclosed and open-faced kind of pineapple tarts.
Cons - Pastry dough is very soft and need to be chilled before shaping and rolling.

Three from Sugahmommy of A Spoonful of Sugah
This recipe uses rubbing-in method and contains whole egg and the least amount of sugar.
Pros - The tarts are sturdy and stacking them into cookie jar is never a problem. As described, these tarts are indeed slightly firmer with a biscuit-like texture.
Cons - Pastry dough is very soft too and need to be chilled before shaping and rolling.
 
Now which recipe do you think is the best...

More pineapple tarts made with my homemade pineapple jam

The Fresh from the Oven recipe uses creaming method and the other two use rubbing-in method.

Shaping the open-face tarts with different pastry moulds...

... this helps to differentiate the different recipes used.

The answer is here!

Thumb up from my little boy!

Here's the comparison table showing three of the chosen pineapple tart pastry recipes.
(with my notes and modification in blue)

Ingredients:

* Number of pineapple tarts made can vary with the sizes of mould used.

All of the above standardised recipes do not contain any vanilla extract or iced water for fair comparison

My egg wash: 1 egg yolk plus 2 tbsp of milk

Methods

Recipe One, Fresh from the oven

Sieve all purpose flour, corn flour, salt and icing sugar into a medium bowl. Beat butter in a mixer until it turns light in color and fluffy. Add in egg yolk until well combined. Slowly beat in the flour mixture until just combined.

Although the dough is workable at this stage, I have standardised all recipes and chilled the dough for at least 30 mins before proceeding the assembly.

To assemble, roll pineapple filling into small individual rounds. Turn dough out and roll into small rounds. Flatten the rounds and use it to cover the prepared filling.

Note: I rolled the dough into 0.5 cm thickness and cut them into shapes into my mould. I placed small and rolled teaspoonful of pineapple jam in the center of each pastry and decorated the edge with a pincher.

Brush the unbaked rolls with egg wash.

Bake in a preheated oven at 350F/180ºC for 10 to 15 mins or till lightly brown.

Recipe Two, Alvina's Baking Journey

Whisk top flour, milk powder, icing sugar together until very mix well.

Rub in the cold butter cubes with your finger tips until the mixture resembles breadcrumb. Add egg yolk to the flour and butter mixture and gently mix with a spatula until the dough comes together.
 
Knead very briefly , wrap in clingwrap and chill for 15 to 30 mins.

Preheat oven 200ºC. Portion pastry dough into 8 to 9 g each , flatten dough and wrap in 1 tsp of pineapple paste.
 
Note: I rolled the dough into 0.5 cm thickness and cut them into shapes into my mould. Then, I placed small and rolled teaspoonful of pineapple jam in the center of each pastry

Brush the pastry ball with egg and bake for 13 to 16 mins.

Recipe Three, A Spoonful of Sugah

Sift flours and icing sugar together, twice. Cut butter into small pieces and run into sifted flour. After it is completely rubbed in, add egg and then slowly add in the cold water (only if needed and I didn't do that) to get a nice and fairly firm dough. 

Wrap each portion in plastic wrap and chill for 30 mins. Roll out into 0.5 cm thickness between 2 sheets of plastic and then chill again for another 15 mins. (I skipped this chilling step)

Meanwhile, roll jam into small balls for easy filling.

Take out dough and cut using a pineapple tart mould. Fill with jam. If dough is too soft to work with, flour your hands, the work table and rolling pin, making sure not to add too much flour to the dough or it will become tough. If necessary, flour the tart cutter before cutting each tart, so that the tart removes easily with all its patterns/grooves intact.

Arrange tarts on tray lined with baking paper. Chill in fridge for about 10 mins (I skipped this last chilling step), then bake at 140ºC for about 30 mins. When ready, leave to cool and store.
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For all three recipes, I have baked all tarts at 160ºC fan forced for 13 mins
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We are very happy with all the tarts made with the above recipes but there is always a winner in respective with all comparisons and the winner is Recipe One, Fresh from the oven

Although the fresh from the oven's tarts are quite fragile and difficult to handle, they are the tastiest of all. In fact, this recipe contains the most amount of icing sugar than the other two. Interestingly, even with more flours content and without the milk powder, these simple tarts are able to melt into our mouth and even melt better than the ones made with the other two recipes.

With all these baking, I also learned that whole eggs does firm up the final texture of pastry creating a nice biscuit-y texture. And, if you are the person who prefer the biscuit-y kind of pineapple tart, Recipe Three, A Spoonful of Sugah would be the perfect recipe for you.

Why is Recipe One, Fresh from the oven so good? 

Remember my last year post when I baked my pineapple tarts using the recipe by The Little Teochew? I really love the tarts made with this recipe and did re-visited The Little Teochew recipe a few times after this post. Now, I begin to ask myself... which is better? Fresh from the oven or The Little Teochew?

Honestly, I think both are equally good! Why? I guess this may be the answer to my question...

When I compared both recipes by standardising their butter content to 100g, I found out that they are actually quite the same! Their amount of flour + cornfour, icing sugar and egg yolk are almost the same. The main difference is their mixing method which require an extra 20g of flour to firm up the dough if the butter is creamed at room temperature. 

Another thing that I have noticed is that The Little Teochew has used 8g more cornflour than Fresh from the oven which makes the pastry more melt-y with a lesser gluten content. When I re-visited The Little Teochew recipe, a curious me had replaced all-purpose flour with cake flour and the outcome is actually quite disastrous! The tarts made with cake flour are extremely fragile to handle and so I would like to conclude that these two recipes have reached their maximum point of their melt-in-mouth composition. 

Last and most importantly, I learned not to reduce the amount of icing sugar in any these recipes further. Without adequate amount of sweetness, these pineapple tarts wouldn't be tasty at all. 

Depending on individual tastes and preferences, the best pineapple tart or even other bakes can be very subjective. I realized that some of my relatives (being Asians) don't like the milky smell of butter at all and prefer their tarts made with margarine. Now, I wondering if any of these recipes would work well with margarine...

With all these pineapple tarts baking, I'm asking myself... Have I find the pineapple tart recipe? I think so...  I have discovered a lot more pineapple tart recipes recently. Some are simply the enclosed kind. Some are the nastar kind. Some are the Taiwan-style kind... In particular, I would like to try these two recipes from Sonia, Nasi Lemak Lover and Angel from Cook.Bake.Love before Chinese New Year next year. If time permits, I would love to try baking a lot more pineapple tarts recipes any time sooner...

Happy Baking

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