PASTRIES

1. PASTRIES Foods 20

2. What is it? • Both pasta and pastry are unleavened dough’s. The major difference is that pasta is made of flour mixed with liquid and the dough is boiled, whereas pastry is made of flour mixed with fat and the dough is baked. Pastry dough may be used for sweet pies or savory tarts and turnovers. When made with sugar, pastries encompass a wide variety of baked goods.

3. What It Does • The basic ingredients of pastry are flour, far, water or other liquid, saltfor flavor, and sometimes sugar for sweetness and browning. Pastry dough differs from pasta and bread dough in that it is usually handled gently to minimize the development of gluten, the stretchy mix of proteins that gives dough its structure.

4. What It Does • Minimal gluten allows pastry dough to be easily shapedand remain tender when baked. Various types of pastry are made with the same basic method, but slight variations in the flour, fat, amount of liquid and mixing method create the different dough structures that result in crumbly, flaky, or crispy pastry.

5. Short Pastry • French-style short pastry is rich, crumbly dough used for sweet or savory pies, tarts, quiches, turnovers, samosas, empanadas, and pastries, especially those with moist filling. It’s often made with lower-protein pastry flour to minimize gluten development and keep the pastry tender (less protein means less gluten). 1 part pastry Flour = 3 parts all purpose flour Proportions of ingredients: 2 ½ flour : 1 fat (butter, shortening, rendered fat)

6. Short Pastry • The fat is thoroughly cut or rubbed into the flour until the fat is barely visible and the dough resembles coarse crumbs. This fat-mixing technique makes the dough crumbly. The fat coats the flour and waterproofs it, preventing moisture from getting in and developing gluten, which keeps the dough tender. Egg yolks, cream, milk, water, or other liquids are mixed in to bind the fat-coated flour into a cohesive dough.

7. Short Pastry • Short pastry usually includes just a small amount of liquid because lesswater and more fat yields a more crumbly pastry. The dough is gently kneaded or rolled to distribute the fat throughout the flour. The resulting dough structure consists of small particles of flour separated by a coating of fat, which produces crumbly pastry. A cookie crumb crust is essentially a type of short pastry that starts with crumbs rather than mixing fat into flour to create crumbs.

8. Sweet Short Pastry • “Sugar pastry” is a pate brisèe sweetened for dessert pies and tarts and often enriched with egg yolk. The sugar helps to prevent gluten formation, making the dough more tender and crumbly. Pate sable (sandy pastry) contains even more sugar, which gives the pastry a super-crumbly sand-like texture.

9. Pie Dough • Most North American pie pastry or pie dough is different from pate brisèe in that it’s made to be more flaky than crumbly. Pie dough is usually made with slightly higher-protein all-purpose flour, which develops a little more gluten to support the layers of fat necessary for flakiness. However, with more protein in the flour, tenderness is achieved by gently working fat into the flour to limit gluten development.

10. Pie Dough • Incorporating some lower-protein pastry flour contributes to tenderness. Other ways to limit gluten and create tenderness include adding an acidic ingredient such as lemon juice, vinegar, buttermilk, or sour cream to break down and weaken the gluten protein network, and add sugar to bind water that would otherwise hydrate the flour and develop gluten.

11. Pie Dough • Flakiness is quite different from tenderness and depends mostly on the type of fat and how is worked into the dough. Only solid fatsmake flaky pastry. Liquid fatslike vegetable oil form rounded lumps of flour and keep them separated and crumbly as in tender short pastry. For the flakiest pastry, you need to flatten solid fat to form it into flakes. The fat is gently – not thoroughly – worked or mixed into the flour so that some if it remains in chunks.

12. Pie Dough • When rolled, these chunks flatten out into sheets of fat that you can see in the dough. The resulting dough structure consists of flattened layers of dough between fat layers that puff up into flakes when baked. The difference is that the pieces of fat are only tossed with flour rather than cut the flour.

13. Pie Dough • Then they are rolled flat. Apart from the different fat-mixing method, short pastry and North American pie dough are very similar. Some pie dough recipes have a bit less fat (proportions are typically 3 parts flour to 1 part fat by volume). But small amounts of liquid and gentle kneading are the same for both pastries. As with short pastry, the water in the dough can be replaced with other moist ingredients such as sour cream or cream cheese, which add fat for tenderness along with protein and sugar (lactose) for good browning.

14. Pie Dough • Which solid fat is best? Butter, shortening, and lard are all different. The variables are primarily flavor, melting temperature, water content and fat crystal size. Butter has incomparable flavor but it softens easily at room temperature and melts into liquid over a narrow range of temperatures (90 – 95 F). Ideally, butter should be kept between 58 – 68 F during pastry making so it doesn’t soften too much that it begins to melt into the flour. That’s a narrow window, so pie dough recipes often call for cold butter, cold utensils, and chilling the dough between mixing and rolling.

15. Pie Dough • North American butter also contains 15 – 16% water, which can inhibit flakiness by providing moisture that glues together the flaky thin layers of separated dough. European-style butters contain less water and therefore create flakier pastry. Lard and shortening contain no water at all and yield the flakiest pastry. They’re also easier to work with because they remain workable at a higher range of temperatures than butter, typically up to 75 F for lard and 85 F for shortening. The size of a solid fat’s crystals also affects flakiness.

16. Pie Dough • Leaf lard has the largest crystals and makes the flakiest pastries. But good quality fresh lard is hard to find because of low turnover in most markets. And shortening is flavorless. Some cooks combine butter and shortening or lard for a compromise of flavor and texture. However, if you can manage butter’s low melting temperature and keep it chilled while making dough, nothing beats the taste of pure-butter pastry.

17. Pie Dough • After mixing, pie dough is usually rested and chilled for 30 minutes or up to a day to keep the fat coldand to allow moisture to evenly distribute throughout the dough. Then it is rolled to continue flattening the fat-flour layers into long, thin sheets and to develop a little gluten. For even thickness and to help prevent sticking, it helps to roll from the center outward and rotate the dough a few times.

18. Pie Dough • A floured surface works well but a pastry cloth is even better at preventing sticking and helps you to move the pastry when rolled. When shaping the pastry or lining a pan with it, avoid stretching the dough, because gluten is elastic and will shrink back during baking. If the dough is too elastic to easily shape, let it rest in the refrigerator to relax the gluten, then reshape. Shaped dough can be tightly wrapped and frozen for about 3 weeks.

19. Puff Pastry (Pâtefeuilletèe) • Here’s flakiness taken to the extreme. Puff pastry is the multilayered dough used for napoleons, palmiers, and wrapped meat dishes like beef wellington. Proportion of ingredients: 2 parts flour : 1 part fat

20. Puff Pastry (Pâtefeuilletèe) • Traditionally, pastry flour is used for tenderness, but you can use a low-protein mixture of flours. Butter is the preferred fat for flavor, but shortening doesn’t melt as easily, contains no water, and creates lighter, flakier, crispier pastry. Traditionally, puff pastry is made by mixing preliminary dough (dètrempe) of flour and liquid (such as ice water or cold cream) and a little butter so the dough can be easily worked.

21. Puff Pastry (Pâtefeuilletèe) • Then you shape the remaining butter into a flat slab and chill both the dough and butter slab so they are at the same temperature. You soften them just enough to be worked, then roll out the dough, wrap the slab of butter with the dough and repeatedly roll and fold the dough over itself. Each folding and rolling is known as a turn, and the dough is turned 4 to 5 times and chilled between turns to keep the butter from melting.

22. Puff Pastry (Pâtefeuilletèe) • The process takes several hours but develops enough gluten to support a dough structure of long, razor-thin sheets of flour coated with long, razor-thin sheets of fat. These layers puff up dramatically during baking into brittle “leaves”. For maximum puff, work quickly, use a light hand, and chill the pastry between turns to prevent the fat from meting and gluing together the spate layers of dough.

23. Puff Pastry (Pâtefeuilletèe) • To save time, quick or rough puff pastry is made more like North American pie dough by skipping the preliminary dough and cutting all the fat into the flour at the beginning. Then you roll and fold the dough over itself, chilling between turns. Puff pastry freezes well, and prepared frozen puff pastry is widely available. But it often included shortening instead of more-flavorful butter. Also, some puff pastry shortenings are formulated to remain workable up to 115 F, such a high melting temperature that the fat doesn’t completely melt when it reaches out mouth, causing some products to taste a little greasy.

24. Puff Pastry (Pâtefeuilletèe) • Puff pastry is used in other ways, too. Croissants and Danish pastries are a cross between puff pastry and bread dough. The preliminary dough is made with yeast and enriched with butter or eggs and sometimes sugar. It’s kneaded a little like bread dough to develop some gluten, then rolled and folded with additional fat to create layers as in puff pastry. This mixing technique creates a rich, chewy pastry that rises from yeast and gets flaky from thin layers of fat in the dough.

25. Phyllo (filo) and strudel dough • Another multilayered pastry, phyllo is used to make such dishes as Mediterranean baklava and spanakopita. The dough is made by mixing flour, water,and a small amount of oil or egg then cutting the dough into small pieces and stretching each piece into extremely thin, translucent sheets.

26. Phyllo (filo) and strudel dough • It’s a painstaking, time-consuming process. The phyllo sheets are then brushed with butter and stacked. Strudel dough is a little wetter and is often made with high-protein bread flour so that the entire volume of dough can be stretched into a thin sheet. Phyllo and strudel dough freeze well and both are commercially available.

27. Choux Pastry (pâte à choux) • Quite different from other pastry doughs, choux pastry is a little closer to pancake batter. You combine flour, boiling water, and melted butter over low heat, then beat in eggs to make sticky, pastry dough. The soft dough is piped into rounds, logs, or other shapes, then baking into a hot oven or fried. The water turning to steam puffs up the pastry, then the oven temperature is reduced to dry and crisp the surface. You poke a hole into the soft center of the pastry and fill the cavity with custard, whipped cream, or other fillings to make pastries like éclairs, cream puffs, proliftiteroles, and beignets.

28. How It Works • Most pastry dough is kept cold, then immediately baked at relatively high temperatures (375 to 425 F) to melt the fat, create steam, and quickly set the dough. The starch granules in the flour are coated with fat, which prevents them from absorbing moisture, so less than half of the starch gelatinizes and softens. Instead, the heat changes the gluten chains, firming up the crust. When the fat melts, it leaves behind rounded pockets of air (in crumbly pastry) or flat layers of air (in flaky pastry).

29. How It Works • The heat of the oven expands that air, causing the dough to puff up. As moisture in the dough turns to steam it contributes to the puff. The fat-mixing method that is used and the resulting dough structure make the pastry crumbly, flaky, or crispy in texture. The fat also makes pastry tender and taste rich.

30. How It Works • Choux pastry is slightly different because gently cooking the fat, flour, and liquid together on the stovetop gelatinizes the starch while tenderizing the gluten network. The dough remains soft and tender. While it’s baking, the extra moisture in choux pastry puffs up the dough. The egg proteins coagulate and firm up the surface, resulting in a crisp pastry that remains tender inside.