Strawberry Tarts

Today was my first time ever making a pie crust, along with my first time ever making strawberry tarts. I made two videos (one of me making the crust and one of me doing the strawberry filling). The videos can be seen here and here.

For the crust, I used the recipe found here. The ingredients include:
2 cups flour
pinch of saffron
1 cup of water
1/2 cup butter
2 egg whites

The original recipe for the crust said, "then make your coffyne after this maner take a little faire water and halfe a disshe of butter and a little safron and set all this vpon a chafyngdisshe till it be hote  then temper your flower with this vpon a chafyngdissh till it be hote then temper your floure with this said licour and the white of two egges and also make your coffyn" (A Propre New Booke of Cokery, 1545). 

Instead of making two large pie shells, I decided to make six smaller shells with this dough. For the baking instructions, I followed the directions here. I continued following the directions on this webpage for making the strawberry filling. The original recipe said, "To make a Tart of Strawberries. Wash your strawberries, and put them into your tart, and season them with sugar, cinnamon and ginger, and put in a little red wine into them." (Thomas Dawson, The Good Huswife’s Jewell, 1596.) The ingredients include: strawberries, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp ginger, and 30mL red wine.


After making the dough, as seen in the video, the dough came out looking slimy. So, I put it back in the bowl, added some more flour, and continued to knead the dough until it started to look more like bread dough consistency. Also seen in the video is the second time that I have ever had to separate egg yokes from egg whites. I did great for the first egg, but not so great on the second egg. I fished out as much of the yoke as possible from the second egg. As I do not have weights for baking, I made the crusts without the weights. The dough did not want stay on the sides of the pans.

The remainder of the recipe was simple to follow. The only difficult part was having to change the directions from Celsius to Fahrenheit, along with changing the grams to cups. The tarts are cooling now and will be taste tested tomorrow.