1,540 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...

Drawing a pattern in pastry

Often in the kitchen, in pastry-making, or in baking, we need to trace a pattern on a pastry.

It's just a question of aesthetics but it has its effect after baking on a galette, pithiviers, pâté en croute (terrine in a pie crust), etc.

35 K 4.1/5 (26 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Pastry Patterns Drawing Aesthetic Tracing Gilding Knife

Last modified on: May 23^th 2019

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

Drawing a pattern in pastry

It is not very complicated in principle, in general the dough is gilded with a brush and dorure, and then with the tip of a knife you trace the chosen pattern, before either putting it in the oven directly (puff pastry, shortcrust pastry or sweetcrust pastry (pâte sablée)), or putting it in a warm place (milk rolls or croissants, ...).

galette

It's simple in principle, but it deserves some precisions and 1 or 2 tricks, because it's easy to get it wrong.

How to do it?

dorure

First of all, we agree, you have to "gild", that is to say to pass some gilding with a brush in a fine and regular layer on the top of the dough. This is important for the colouring when baking of course, but also because by doing this you will create a colour contrast between the dough, golden, and the incisions you will make afterwards, which will show the light, non golden dough. It is this contrast that will give a beautiful pattern when baking.

Then you have to draw the pattern, usually you use a small sharp knife, and that's the trick: you mustn't use the blade of the knife normally (as if you were cutting something), but upside down, that is to say you must use the back of the blade, the one that is thicker and does not cut. And that's because you don't want to split the dough, and in the process risk going through it, but just groove it with the thick side of the knife blade.

incrustation en pâtisserie

And if possible, don't hold the knife by the handle (as on this picture), because you have too much strength and you risk to crush the dough when you should be "airy", but rather hold it by the blade, between thumb and forefinger, handle up, almost like a pen.

Once you have learned this gesture, give free rein to your creativity in terms of decoration and draw the pattern of your choice: grid, spiral, flowers, grid,...

To sum up: To trace a pattern on a pastry before baking, the best way is to use the thick side of the blade of a small knife, holding it upside down, by the blade, pinched between the thumb and the index finger.

Lasts posts

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 20251,0195

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 20251,1375

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 20251,028

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20252,7905

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,5523

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

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 201883 K 24.3

Candied fruits: don't get ripped off

Do you like candied fruit? You might like to nibble a handful or add it to a recipe, like a classic fruit cake or delicious Italian specialities like panettone or sicilian epiphany pie.
June 21^th 201767 K 24.2

Tranché, dissociated, failed, in short... missed!

When preparing a sauce or a cream, there's always a (small) risk that the creamy preparation you're working on will suddenly separate into two parts of different textures: a liquid part, for example, and a more or less solid part, or even become lumpy. It's terribly frustrating, but we'll see...
June 19^th 202313 K5

The golden-brown finish on puff pastry

Let's take a look at the tricky matter of producing puff pastry with an attractive, golden-brown finish. French pastry chefs call this "dorure" (literally, "gilding"). Behind this quirky term there lurks a real problem (and the solution): when using puff pastry (pâte feuilletée) for a pie, or...
February 8^th 201847 K 24.6

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 202137 K4.5