1,570 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

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.

7,800 5/5 (15 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Sugar Dough Coloring Baking Golden

Last modified on: November 14^th 2020

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

A little sugar anyway

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

A little leftover butter

Very often when you're making a cake, your recipe will tell you to melt some butter and mix it into the batter - a classic for cookies, cakes, moelleux and the like. And every time you do this, you'll have to butter the baking tin to prevent the dough from sticking during baking. Naturally,...
April 16^th 20266745

A tablet holder

Perhaps you too cook by consulting your recipe on a tablet or phone, and putting it down on your worktop? It's practical, but not the best solution. Here's a look at how you can make an inexpensive, almost universal stand.
March 14^th 20261,4075

Pre-calibrated pastry dough

When making pie dough (shortbread, shortcrust, sweet...), it's always a good idea to make a lot at once, and then divide it into pieces, which you can freeze. I've already pointed out the mistake not to make, which is to form a ball before freezing. It's difficult to roll out afterwards because...
March 9^th 20261,2825

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20253,3045

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20252,2125

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

Preserving egg yolks

If you're using only the egg whites in a recipe (such as meringues ), you'll need to store the yolks until you're ready to use them again. There's nothing very complicated about this in principle - all you have to do is chill them, but there are a few pitfalls to be avoided in practice.
June 18^th 20249,2505

Egg yolks and caster sugar

We often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to be a very ordinary and simple thing to do but, be warned, these two ingredients can behave oddly together.
February 15^th 201885 K 24.3

The bitterness of endives

As I write these lines, we are entering the endive season, and if you like it, it's time to enjoy it, if possible with your local producers. Endive is good, but the reproach that is often made of it, and children in particular, is: "It's bitter! And it is (somewhat) true of course, endives...
February 9^th 201915 K4.9

The baker always gild twice

I've already told you about gilding, the beaten whole egg that is spread with a brush on anything that needs to brown in the oven: puff pastry, pastries, etc. and that professionals use a lot, I'm going to come back to this to clarify a bit how to do it, and give you a professional tip.
June 9^th 201936 K4.2

The so-called "nervous" meats

You've probably heard this before, we're talking about "nervous" meat, or meat with nerves, to describe what is indicated by the blue arrow on the left. This is a piece of beef, and what we call a nerve is not a nerve, it is in fact collagen (chemists sometimes call it a "collagen sink"), a...
April 16^th 202139 K4.5