pastry

View more Food & Cooking videos

Baked dough of flour, fat, and water. There are six basic types: shortcrust, in which the fat is rubbed into the flour; suet crust, in which chopped suet is mixed with the flour; puff and flaky, in which the fat is rolled into the dough; hotwater crust and choux, in which the fat is melted in hot water before being added to the flour (choux pastry also contains eggs and is whisked to a paste before cooking). Phyllo pastry is made from flour and water only.

Suet pastry is raised using baking powder or self-raising flour; puff and flaky and choux pastry are raised by the steam trapped between layers of dough.

1. Any of various unleavened doughs, the basics of which include butter (or other fat), flour and water. Examples include puff pastry, pâte brisée (pie pastry) and pâte sucrée (sweet short pastry). 2. A general term for sweet baked goods such as danish pastries and napoleons.

Pastry is flour mixed with shortening and flavoring ingredients to produce a coherent mass, used for pies and other dishes in North American, European, and Middle Eastern cuisines. Basic additions are fat, a little salt, and water. Pastry-making, pâtisserie in French, has developed as a special branch of cookery. Specialized products of the pastry cook or pâtissier include delicate flour and sugar confections (cakes, cookies, waffles, meringues, frostings, glazes, and fillings) combined in small pastries for snacks, taken with tea or coffee or after meals. By extension, the word pastry is sometimes used collectively to indicate sweet, flour-based items for dessert.

Defining pastry types is difficult, as there are numerous variations. Three basic ones are short-crust or pie pastry, puff pastry, and flaky or rough puff. Short-crust pastry is one part fat (butter, lard, or commercial pastry fat) to two of flour by weight. The fat is cut or rubbed into the flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, a little ice water is added, and the mass is pressed together with minimal working to make a dough. French pâte brisée is similar, but uses a little more fat and is mixed with egg. Variations include sweetened pâte sucrée and pâte sablée (very rich, similar to cookie dough). Short pastries are crumbly when cooked and used for many pies and tarts.

Puff pastry or pâte feuilletée fine, is an elaborate, layered pastry with a tender melting texture and excellent flavor. Equal proportions of butter to flour by weight are used. About a fifth of the butter is cut into the flour, and water is added to make a dough. This is allowed to rest in a cool place, and then rolled out; the remaining butter is then placed as a block in the center of the sheet of dough, which is folded over it. It is rerolled and folded in three, a process known as a "turn." Four turns are made with rests between, giving a dough with thin, even layers of fat between leaves of dough; air pockets also get trapped in the layers. Well-made puff pastry has up to 240 layers, and expands up to eight times its original thickness during baking. It is used for napoleons, cornets (cone-shaped pastries often filled with whipped cream or ice cream), and other fine pastries, sweet or savory, in the French tradition. Yeast-leavened doughs are turned with butter in the same way to make croissants and Danish pastries.

Flaky or rough puff pastries, French demi-feuilletées, are less well-defined. They usually have fat-to-flour ratios that are higher than that of short-crust but lower than that of puff pastry. They are made with the general method used for making puff pastry, but the butter may be spread over the dough in one batch or incorporated in three fractions, one each time the dough is turned. Quick versions are made by cutting the fat into pea-sized lumps, adding water to make a dough, and then giving it three or four turns. The dough has a light and layered effect but does not rise as high as puff pastry. It is also used in similar ways, especially with meat dishes such as beef Wellington.

Many other pastry recipes exist. Choux pastry uses a very different method. Water and butter are heated together; the result is mixed with flour, and eggs are beaten into the mass. The paste produced is soft and supple, and is piped to make cream puffs, chocolate éclairs, and other shapes, or flavored with cheese for the French gougère. English cookery includes hot-water crust: water and lard heated to the boiling point and mixed with flour, giving a malleable, strong paste that is raised while hot to make tall pies of pork or game; and suet crust, made of flour, beef suet, and water, and used for suet puddings and dumplings.

In Central Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, strudel and phyllo pastries are made from a dough of flour, a little butter or oil, and water, which is worked to form an elastic mass that is stretched into a paper-thin sheet. When the pastry is ready for use in baking, its surface is brushed with melted butter. Strudel pastry is rolled around fillings such as apples or poppy seeds, while phyllo is often cut into sheets and stacked in layers with nuts to make sweet dishes, or with spinach and cheese for savory ones.

Indian cookery involves pastry made from flour with a little ghee (clarified butter) or oil. This is used to enclose savory fillings for samosas (turnovers), and is deep-fried, providing the crispness that baking gives to pastries from the European traditions. Some types are cooked alone and drenched in sugar syrup to give sweet pastries. Chinese cookery also includes a few plain short-crust–type pastry recipes, notably that used for moon cakes, filled pastries traditionally eaten to celebrate the Moon (or Mid-Autumn) Festival.

Protein content of the flour is important: too much, and the pastry is tough and shrinks; too little, and it is very mealy. A medium protein content is best. Development of gluten (the protein complex that gives texture to bread) is inhibited by cutting in the fat, a process which coats the flour particles, preventing the water from reaching the proteins. In flaky and puff pastries, turning encourages limited gluten development in horizontal sheets for the characteristic texture.

Fat choice is also important. Butter gives a good flavor but produces a less short texture than lard, which gives a flaky texture. Lard has a coarse crystal structure that coats the flour particles more effectively and is one hundred percent fat, unlike butter, which contains a little water. Some cooks consider a mixture of lard and butter to give the best balance of flavor and texture. Margarine and specially tailored vegetable fats are often substituted on grounds of cost, nutrition, or ethics. Oils give very crumbly pastry. Keeping pastry cool during working is also important, otherwise the fat becomes oily and the texture suffers.

During baking, the water in pastry vaporizes and allows crisp flakes of dough to form. In puff pastry, water vapor and air trapped between the layers expand and force them apart, making the pastry rise; a similar effect produces the characteristically hollow texture of choux pastry.

The history of pastry has been little explored. Pastry of a sort was known to both Greek and Roman civilizations, but it was oil-based, and limited in its applications. Late medieval references to pastry do not make it clear what type is being referred to. In the seventeenth century, the work of La Varenne (originally published in 1651) and others shows that several types of pastry were recognized. Methods for puff pastry had developed, as had pastes rich with butter, cream, or eggs, used for little tarts and pies. These were intended to be eaten, unlike the coarse puff paste made for great pies, which was plain, made from brown rye flour with only a little fat. It protected game and meat fillings from intense heat during cooking, and acted as a container that excluded air and preserved the contents afterwards. By the nineteenth century, pastry making was a complex art, recorded by chefs such as Jules Gouffé who moved between the great houses of Europe, learning and codifying techniques from different places. Pastry had also developed as a traditional product in certain areas, such as Cornwall in England, where Cornish pasties, semicircular turnovers filled with meat and vegetables, had become a traditional food for miners.

The ingredients of pastry make it an energy-dense food, and the use of fats such as butter and lard gives it a high cholesterol content, but it is so important and convenient as an edible container that it seems likely to remain popular. Many types of sweet pastry that were developed were intended to be treats, not everyday food; it is only the abundant wheat and fat production of modern agriculture that has made them so accessible.

Bibliography

Beck, Simone, and Julia Child. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 2. London: Penguin Books, 1970

Davidson, Alan. "Pastry." In The Oxford Companion to Food, edited by Alan Davidson, pp. 585–587. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Gouffé, Jules. The Royal Cookery Book [Le Livre de cuisine]. Translated from the French and adapted by Alphonse Gouffé. London: Sampson Low Son and Marston, 1868.

La Varenne, François Pierre. The French Cook. With an introduction by Philip and Mary Hyman. Lewes, U.K.: Southover Press, 2001.

McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking. New York: Scribners, 1984.

—Laura Mason

• Types of Food - pastry: fancy, sweetened baked goods
• flour
• Pastry - pastry: fancy, sweetened baked good, often with filling

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2008)

See also: List of pastries

This article is about the food. For the distributed hash table system, see Pastry (DHT).

Palmier pastries

Blackberry pie made with a pastry crust

Pastry is the name given to various kinds of baked products made from ingredients such as flour, sugar, milk, butter, shortening, baking powder, and/or eggs. Small cakes, tarts and other sweet baked products are called "pastries."

Pastry may also refer to the dough from which such baked products are made. Pastry dough is rolled out thinly and used as a base for baked products. Common pastry dishes include pies, tarts, quiches and pasties.^[1][2]

Pastry is differentiated from bread by having a higher fat content, which contributes to a flaky or crumbly texture. A good pastry is light and airy and fatty, but firm enough to support the weight of the filling. When making a shortcrust pastry, care must be taken to blend the fat and flour thoroughly before adding any liquid. This ensures that the flour granules are adequately coated with fat and less likely to develop gluten. On the other hand, overmixing results in long gluten strands that toughen the pastry. In other types of pastry, such as Danish pastry and croissants, the characteristic flaky texture is achieved by repeatedly rolling out a dough similar to that for yeast bread, spreading it with butter, and folding it to produce many thin layers of folds.

Contents 1 Main types of pastry 2 Background 3 Definitions 4 Chemistry of a pastry 5 History 6 Pastry chef 7 Gallery 8 See also 9 References 10 External links

Main types of pastry

Pecan and maple Danish pastry, a puff pastry type

Profiterole or cream puff, a choux pastry

Strudel, a phyllo pastry

Shortcrust pastry 

Shortcrust, or short, pastry is the simplest and most common pastry. It is made with flour, fat, salt, and water.This is used mainly in tarts. It is also the pastry that is used most often in making a quiche. The process of making pastry includes mixing of the fat and flour, adding water, and rolling out the paste. The fat is mixed with the flour first, generally by rubbing with fingers or a pastry blender, which inhibits gluten formation and results in a soft, tender pastry. A related type is the sweetened sweetcrust pastry.

Flaky pastry

Flaky pastry is a simple pastry that expands when cooked due to the number of layers. It bakes into a crisp, buttery pastry. The "puff" is obtained by beginning the baking process with a high temperature and lowering the temperature to finish.

Puff pastry 

Puff pastry has many layers that cause it to expand or “puff” when baked. Pastries are made using flour, butter, salt, and water. Pastry rises up due to the combination and reaction of the four ingredients and also from the air that gets between the layers. Puff pastries come out of the oven light, flaky, and tender.

Choux pastry 

Choux pastry is a very light pastry that is often filled with cream. The pastry is filled with various flavors of cream and is often topped with chocolate. Choux pastries can also be filled with ingredients such as cheese, tuna, or chicken to be used as appetizers.

Phyllo (filo) pastry 

Phyllo pastries are usually paper-thin and greatly stretched. They involve several stretched out layers and are wrapped around a filling and brushed with butter. These pastries are very delicate and can break easily.^[3]

Background

Pastries go back to the ancient Mediterranean with almost paper-thin, multi-layered baklava and filo. Northern Europe took on pastry-making after the Crusaders brought it back from the Mediterranean. French and Italian Renaissance chefs eventually perfected the Puff and Choux pastries, while 17th and 18th century chefs brought new recipes to the table.^[4] These new pastries included brioche, Napoleons, cream puffs, and éclairs. French chef Antonin Carême reportedly was the first to incorporate art in pastry making.^[5]

Definitions

A French pastry shop window

Pastry chef with croquembouche

• Pastry: A type of food in famous dishes like pie and strudel.
• Pastry bag or Piping bag: An often cone shaped bag that is used to make an even stream of dough, frosting, or flavored substance, to form a structure, decorate a baked good, or fill a pastry with a custard, cream, jelly, or other filling.
• Pastry board: A square or oblong board preferably marble but usually wood on which pastry is rolled out.
• Pastry brake: Opposed and contra-rotating rollers with a variable gap through which pastry can be worked and reduced in thickness for commercial production. A very small version is used domestically for pasta production.
• Pastry case: An uncooked or blind baked pastry container used to hold savory or sweet mixtures.
• Pastry cream: Confectioner's custard. An egg and flour thickened custard made with sweetened milk flavored with vanilla. Used as a filling for flans, cakes, pastries, tarts, etc. The flour prevents the egg from curdling.
• Pastry cutters: Various metal or plastic outlines of shapes, e.g. circles fluted circles, diamonds, ginger bread men, etc. Sharpened on one edge and used to cut out corresponding shapes from biscuit, scone, pastry, or cakes mixtures.^[6]
• Pastry blender: A kitchen implement used to properly combine the fat and flour. Usually constructed of wire or plastic, with multiple wires or small blades connected to a handle.
• Viennoiserie: French term for "Viennese pastry," now used as a common term for many puff- and choux-based pastries, including croissants, brioche, and pain au chocolat.

Chemistry of a pastry

Different kinds of pastries are made by the nature of wheat flour and also due to certain types of fats. When wheat flour is kneaded into plain dough and made with water it develops strands of gluten, which are what make the bread tough and elastic. In a typical pastry, however, this toughness is unwanted so fat or oil is put in to slow down the development of gluten. It is common to use lard or suet here because they have a coarse, crystalline structure that is very effective. Using only unclarified butter does not always work well because of its water content; clarified butter is virtually water free. Shortcrust pastry using only butter may develop an inferior texture. If the fat is melted with hot water, or if liquid oil is used, the thin oily layer between the grains offers less obstacle to gluten formation and the resulting pastry is tougher.^[7]

History

A buffet of Moroccan pastries

A typical Mediterranean baklava, a phyllo dough pastry sweetened with syrup

Shop selling pastries in Syria

European traditions of pastry-making is often traced back to the short crust era flaky doughs that were in use throughout the Mediterranean in ancient times. These recipes were popularized in Western Europe by Crusaders returning home.

In the Mediterranean, the Romans, Greeks and Phoenicians all had filo-style pastries in their culinary traditions. There is also strong evidence that the ancient Egyptians produced pastry-like confections. It is very possible that Egyptians made and ate pastries. They had professional bakers that surely had the skills to do so, and they also had needed materials like flour, oil, and honey. In the plays of Aristophanes, in 5th century BC, there are mentions of sweetmeats including small pastries filled with fruit. The Roman cuisine used flour, oil and water to make pastries that were used to cover meats and fowls. They did this during baking to keep in the juices, but this was not meant to be eaten by people. A pastry that was meant to be eaten was a richer pastry that was made into small pastries and contained eggs or little birds. It was often served at banquets. Greeks and Roman both struggled in making a good pastry because they both used oil in the cooking process and oil causes the pastry to lose its stiffness.^[8]

In medieval cuisine of North Europe they were able to produce nice, stiff pastries because they cooked with shortening and butter. There were some incomplete lists of ingredients found in medieval cookbooks, but no full, detailed versions. There were stiff, empty pastries called coffins or 'huff paste', that were eaten by servants only and included an egg yolk glaze to help make them more enjoyable to consume. Medieval pastries also included small tarts to add richness to the snack.

It was not until about the Mid 16th century that actual pastry recipes showed up.^[7][9] These recipes were adopted and adapted over time in various European countries, resulting in the myriad pastry traditions known to the region, from Portuguese "pastéis de nata" in the west to Russian "pirozhky" in the east. The use of chocolate in pastry-making in the West, so commonplace today, arose only after Spanish and Portuguese traders brought chocolate to Europe from the New World starting in the 16th century. Many culinary historians consider French pastry chef Antonin Carême (1784–1833) to have been the first great master of pastry making in modern times.

Pastry-making also has a strong tradition in many parts of Asia. Chinese pastry is made from rice, or different types of flour, with fruit, sweet bean paste or sesame-based fillings. Beginning in the 19th century, the British brought western-style pastry to the far east, though it would be the French influenced Maxim in the 1950s that made western pastry popular in Chinese-speaking regions starting with Hong Kong. Still, the term "Western Cake" (西餅) is used to differentiate between the automatically assumed Chinese pastry. Other Asian countries such as Korea have traditionally prepared pastry-confections such as tteok, hangwa, and yaksik with flour, rice, fruits, and regional specific ingredients to make unique type desserts. And Japan also has specialized pastry-confections better known as mochi and manju. Pastry-confection that originate in Asia are clearly distinct from those that originate in the West that are generally much sweeter.

Pastry chef

Pastry chefs use a combination of culinary ability and creativity in baking, decoration, and flavoring with ingredients. Many baked goods require a lot of time and focus. Presentation is an important part of pastry and dessert preparation. The job is often physically demanding; requiring attention to detail and long hours.^[10] They are also responsible for creating new recipes to put on the menu. Pastry chefs work in restaurants, bistros, large hotels, casinos and bakeries. Pastry baking is usually held in a slightly separate part from the main kitchen. This section of the kitchen is in charge of making pastries, desserts, and other baked goods.^[11]

Gallery

• 

  Linzer torte

• 

  a Dutch Poffert, bundt cake.

• 

  a Petit four

• 

  assortment of cookies (also called biscuits in some areas)

• 

  Cream puff pastry, Dutch Moorkoppen

• 

  Tompouce, a Dutch and Belgian pastry

• 

  Liège style waffle

• 

  English Pork pie topped with redcurrants

See also

Cake shop Danish pastry Doughnut Hot water crust pastry Jesuite

Food portal Konditorei List of pastries Pastry fork Pâtisserie Pie crust Pastry brush

References

1. ^ Bo Friberg. Professional Pastry Chef. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 0-471-21825-1. 
2. ^ L. Patrick Coyle (1982). The World Encyclopedia of Food. Facts on File Inc. ISBN 0-87196-417-1. 
3. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20061031174304/http://www.kswheat.com/upload/got-pastry.pdf
4. ^ Welcome to onlinereviewworld.com: Page 404
5. ^ Food Timeline: history notes-pie & pastry
6. ^ Sinclair, Charles. International Dictionary of Culinary Terms. Grand Rapids: Bloomsbury Plc, 1998
7. ^ ^{a b} Jaine, Tom, and Soun Vannithone. The Oxford Companion to Food. New York: Oxford UP, 1999
8. ^ History of Baking and Pastry Cooking
9. ^ Pastry
10. ^ Pastry Chef | Read a Pastry Chef Job Description & Get Career Information
11. ^ Pastry Chef Job Profile

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pastries

• Pastry – entry at Encyclopedia Britannica

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - fint brød, kagedej

Nederlands (Dutch)
gebak, (korst)deeg

Français (French)
n. - pâte, pâtisserie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Teig, Gebäck(stück)

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - πάστα, ζύμη, γλύκισμα, γλυκίσματα

Italiano (Italian)
paste, pasticcini, pasticceria

Português (Portuguese)
n. - pastelaria (f), massa (f), folhado (m)

Русский (Russian)
кондитерские изделия, пирожное, сдобное тесто

Español (Spanish)
n. - pasteles, pastas

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - bakelse, pajdeg

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
面粉糕饼, 馅饼皮

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 麵粉糕餅, 餡餅皮

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 밀가루반죽, 케이크

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 練り粉, 練り粉菓子

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) فطيرة باللحم, سنبوسك‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מאפה, עוגה, קונדיטין‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.