True. But …
His tarts also have sorta vertical sides. But not as tall.
So the simple 9 yarts per pie geometry falls apart some.
Overall, we’re about as close to a calculable answer as we can get. It’ll be more than 5 & less than 12. The rest depends on unpredictable details of size, shape,rolling thickness, technique.
That website seems to be allowing a little space around the inner circles. That is, it assumes you can’t actually fit three 3" circles across the diameter of a 9" circle. If you ask how many 3" circles fit in a 9" circle it says 5, but if you ask how many 2.999" circles fit in a 9" circle it says 7.
It appears that about 1 part in 10^15 is enough slack for it to find the seven-circle solution.
Whatever it is doing, it does not do a very good job; e.g., I tried packing unit circles in a larger circle of radius 7.7242, and it came up with only 44, whereas the link I gave has 47.
ETA it appears to look for some sort of symmetric arrangement… it also does not seem to spend even a few seconds of computation time optimizing the packing
I see now that I actually need 3.5" circles.
As for pre-made frozen tart shells, they only come precooked and these tarts need to bake.
Here is the “good” link: e.g. it comes up with the 7-circle solution for 9"/3", and of course only 4 for 9"/3.5". It says the latest update was in 2014.
I’ve made the mince and holy shit is it good. Where the hell has this stuff been all my life?
To hell with what they taste like, how many 3" circles did you get? :dubious:
I concur and that’s a course in materials science talking. That was a fun course.
Where are you? In my grocery store (Canada), the frozen, unbaked tart shells are near the pie crusts. They even come in the little foil tins. Easy-peasy.
I checked at two stores and all I saw were the mini puff pastry shells. But I’ve been known to have selective blindness. Well, the mince mix is going to sit for a few days in the fridge, so perhaps I’ll look elsewhere.
I would DEFINITELY recommend making the dough from scratch. American pie crusts are… wrong… for mince pies. They OUGHT to be very short and crumbly, and sweet. Pie crust is too bland and greasy-textured.
This Paul Hollywood recipe looks about right. Just for the dough, obv, since you’ve made the filling. I grabbed a jar of Robertson’s, personally, which I will doctor up.
Sorry, I don’t know how many from the original dough, but I did wonder about rolling out the remaining dough and using it.
@ Patx2: As several folks have commented, scraps can be recombined just fine. Especially by somebody named ChefGuy.
In addition to my caveat in my earlier post I’m going to suggest that the dough for a 9" pie will best be rolled out thicker than for a 3" tart. Said another way, if starting with a prefab crust for a 9" pie, you’ll want to roll it out a bit flatter for 3" tarts.
Which will further increase the diameter of the dough sheet and increase the tart yield.
Well, yeah, but a guy named ChefGuy is asking advice.
All bets are off.
This sounds vaguely pornographic.
That’s twice this week somebody has accused one of my posts on cooking of being pornographic. Hmmm.
NM, I really should have continued reading (I came up with 7).
Okay, I bought 12" crusts and had to use a 3.5" cutter. I was able to get eight rounds on the first pass. I had four crusts, so punched out 24 rounds for the mince tarts, then combined all the scraps and made jam tarts out of them.
I hesitate to nitpik (as strange as that sounds, knowing me), because, as mentioned, I’m guessing a guy named Chefguy is a chef guy, and my relationship to baking is …fraught.
But scraps of rough or full-on puff pastry degrade after recombination.
But mince pies with puff pastry sound lousy.
Chefguy, congratulations on your yummy new (self) discovery! And get some sleep!