The Timing Mistake Ina Garten Warns Will Ruin Chilled Pastry

If you are a pastry chef or like to play one when you are in the kitchen, you probably know getting your pastry dough just right is important for your pies and apple turnovers. But one of the most important ingredients that goes into making pastry dough is patience. It needs to chill so that gluten can settle down. When this happens, you are setting your dough up for success. Properly chilled pastry dough is easier to roll out and ultimately bakes better; however, Ina Garten says if you chill your pastry dough longer than an hour, you are going to have problems.

Garten explains in her cookbook, "Cook Like A Pro," that you need to chill your dough for 60 minutes so it becomes elastic and your rolling pin can do its job. But when you forget about your dough, not only will it be difficult to roll out, but Garten wrote, "If you overchill dough and then try to bring it back to the right temperature, it will always be too soft on the outside and too hard on the inside."

Chilling your dough and allowing it to rest for an hour also allows the moisture to spread throughout. Even if you have arms like those of Linda Hamilton from "The Terminator," that's not going to save overchilled dough. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to feel the effects of shrinkage and doesn't hold it shape. And if you plan on making one of Garten's boozy Thanksgiving day pies, or another holiday classic, that's not a baking challenge you want to have to correct.

Of course, if you do find that you were busy binging your favorite Netflix show du jour and you leave your pastry dough chilling a little longer than you meant to, you can try and get it back to where it needs to be by banging it with a rolling pin a couple of times to loosen it up. This should make it easier to roll out.