Help - holes in my pastry case! What shall I do?

[Kathyis6incheshigh]

Aargh!
Am making lemon meringue pie.
For the first time ever I used 00 flour instead of ordinary plain, as recommended by the lovely Nigella. Only the pastry case has shrunk massively in the oven and 2 holes have appeared.
What shall I do...? Won't the lemon curd fall through the holes and turn the whole thing into a mess?

Do you have any scraps of pastry left you could "patch" it with?

brush it with egg white and shove it back in the oven for 5 minutes

albumen = plastic

bloody nigella, yet more proof she doesn't test her reicipes

How big are the holes? If they are not too big the I would think it will be fine as the lemon mixture will solidify quite quickly.

AND if you want my tip for non soggy flan cases, add a dessert spoon ful of fine cornmeal/polenta to the flour in the pastry recipe and use half white fat half butter

Thanks
Will do what Suzy says, as I have used up all the pastry but have (of course) egg whites to hand.

try dummies.com in the food and drink section?

Well that worked, it looks like it has little white patches on it
Bloody Nigella 'I only make pastry with 00 flour' Lawson.

ahhh, my work is done.......

00 flour is high gluten and therefore very short and dense, what on EARTH was she thinking?
FWIW she does an utterly nauseating advert for Twinnings English Breakfast Tea all over Asia. Silly bint.

Although I like and use a lot some of Nigella's recipes, she does do some downright stupid things. The 00 flour is one of them. The other one that winds me up is that she specifies unsalted butter in recipes that have salt in them, FGS! (I always ignore both on cost grounds)

Yes Suzy, that's what I thought. 00 flour is finely milled but high in gluten. I think it's because of the fine milling that she recommends it on the grounds that it rubs in easily, but as you say, the gluten would make it stretchy and Not Good.

However MacDougalls do make a 00 'sauce and pastry' flour that does work ok (though not noticeably better for pastry than ordinary plain IMO).

So maybe 00 technically just refers to the granule size, though most 00 flours are pasta flours and hence high in gluten.

So I wonder if what happened was that Nigella has some particular make of Italian 00 flour which was less high in gluten than normal so she got the idea that all 00 flours would work.

ROFL - I am always giving Nigella the benefit of the doubt when she lets me down by assuming she is using some ultra-posh product which does actually work. (which is what happened famously with the clingfilm when she told people to line their cake tins with it and it melted )