1,609 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 77 videos

A little sugar anyway

I'm coming back to something I've already told you about, but which focused on brioche dough, so I'll try to generalize about these doughs, which are generally sweet, but can also be used in savory recipes.

8,543 5/5 (15 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Sugar Dough Coloring Baking Golden

Last modified on: November 14^th 2020

For this post Comments Lasts posts Follow

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

If you're making a tart or a tartelette, you're almost certainly going to use shortcrust pastry. For a dessert, it's very classic (and delicious), but what about for something savory: a quiche or a tourte, for example?

quiche lorraine

In that case, you'd be better off using a much less sweet shortcrust pastry to line your mold(s).

moule foncé

Less sweet (20 g vs. 110 g for 500 g flour), but still sweet, wouldn't it be worth doing away with sugar altogether?

The small amount of sugar won't affect the taste (so your quiche won't be sweet, phew), but it will affect the coloring of the pastry, bringing about a beautiful browning at the end of cooking. This browning is due to the caramelization of the sugar during cooking, the famous Maillard reaction.

pate colorée

Put another way, if you don't put that little bit of sugar in, your tart/quiche/tart, or rather its pastry, will remain a little whitish, dull, and therefore sadly unappetizing.

pate sans sucre

This small amount of sugar (5% of the weight of flour), which you can't taste, but which affects the coloring, is found in almost all doughs that you want to be golden-brown: shortcrust, deep-drawn, pizza, nacho, etc., and you shouldn't eliminate it thinking it's useless.

To sum up: you always need a little sugar in a flour-based dough intended for a savoury recipe, for the sake of beautiful colouring when cooked.

Lasts posts

Season to the right level

When you need to salt something—for example, fish fillets before cooking them—you’ll naturally sprinkle them with a pinch of salt using your fingers. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this very ordinary gesture, which is done all the time in the kitchen, and yet there’s a...
October 14^th 20261,1745

How to Properly Fill a Jar

When you have a jar in your kitchen that’s almost empty—flour or almond flour, for example—you’ll probably refill it before it’s completely empty. And that’s a great way to go about it—no one wants to run out of an ingredient right in the middle of a recipe. Once you’ve...
October 2^nd 20269565

Serving Temperature for Wine

When it comes to serving wine, you may (like me) have a fairly simple rule of thumb: red wine at room temperature, and white, rosé, and yellow wines in the fridge until it’s time to serve them. It’s very easy to remember, but it’s a bit simplistic, and you’ll see that there’s a much...
September 23^th 20261,0685

Hot Emulsified Sauces

In French cuisine, sauces are a very important part of a recipe—not just a side dish. In fact, they’re so important that, especially since the time of Auguste Escoffier, they’ve been classified into categories. And among these categories are “hot emulsified sauces,” or lukewarm ones. ...
September 9^th 20261,4565

Hot Dishes and Cold Dishes

When plating or serving a dish—whether hot or cold—on a plate, it’s very important to make sure they’re both the right temperature; in other words: if the dish is hot, the plate should be hot, and conversely, if the dish is cold, the plate should be cold. Is this really important? Let’s...
September 2^nd 20261,2003

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other articles you might also like

The right weight of pastry for a pie

Let's try to solve a thorny problem: How much dough will I need when I make my next pie? You're planning to make a pie, you're going to use your favourite mould or circle, but how much pastry will you need to fill it completely with a well spread pastry, without being too thin, or on the contrary...
March 20^th 202070 K4.3

Do you know Yotam Ottolenghi?

Do you know Yotam Ottolenghi? Maybe not, in which case let me tell you a little about him.
December 19^th 20209,5764.8

Zester like a pro

Have you heard of the microplane? It's an extraordinary tool that allows you to grate very, very finely, and therefore zest with disconcerting ease. Here's some information about it.
December 25^th 202010 K4.9

Let's go easy on the salt

In terms of cooking, I'm probably not teaching you much, salt is ubiquitous, we put it in almost all our dishes, in varying amounts depending on our taste, some like salty, others less, others still not. Its main role is the flavor, the taste, we say that it is a flavor enhancer, ie it reveals the...
February 20^th 202110 K4.8

The "caves" in the bakery and pastry shop

Maybe you've already done this? You want to make a brioche or a cake with fruit inside, you decide to proceed with your usual recipe, but also to add in the dough pieces of fresh and raw fruit, or whole fruit, for example pieces of apples or pears, good idea. When you bake it, everything seems to...
March 27^th 202114 K4.9