1,564 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...

Pastry and bakery dough families

There are many kinds, or families, of pastry and bakery doughs, depending on whether you want to make a tart, a cake, a pie, a brioche, croissants and so on.

I'll try to give you a quick overview of all these doughs, how they're classified, and what they're used for.

14 K 4.9/5 (16 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Pastry Dough Differences Texture

Last modified on: November 16^th 2020

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

Pastry and bakery dough families

Shortcrust pastry (or "tart dough")

These are the simplest, with no yeast in them, just a mixture of flour, butter, sugar and sometimes egg. They include shortcrust, shortbread, sweet and dark pastry. They're all based on the same principle, changing only the weights of butter and sugar, mainly.

Their specificity, if you like, is that you don't work them, or you work them as little as possible. As soon as the mixture is done, you stop everything, and you don't insist, because otherwise the gluten network will start to build up, and your dough will become elastic, which is something you really don't want.

Battered dough

These are the doughs used for cakes, sponge cakes, choux pastry, etc. This is achieved either by whipping in air during kneading, or by adding baking powder, which causes the dough to swell during cooking.

Puff pastry

These doughs are more complex to make: you start by kneading a simple, lightly buttered dough, called a "détrempe", to which you then add butter, enclosing it in the "détrempe". The whole thing is then folded several times ("turns") to obtain the famous puff pastry. This is mainly puff pastry.

Leavened dough

You guessed it, they're going to rise! And that's all because baker's yeast is added to it, which causes the dough to rise after a fairly long resting period in a warm place. These are doughs that are kneaded for a long time, often with butter: brioche dough, bread pudding dough, Viennoise dough, etc.

Croissants dough

As its french name suggests (pâte levée-feuilletée), this is the fusion of the 2 previous types: We still prepare a distemper, but there's baker's yeast in it, and then we also incorporate butter by "tourage".

The dough is then rolled out, left to rise, and finally baked, giving a delicious mix of crispiness and softness. This is the dough used for croissants and pains au chocolat, the most technical of all, but also the one that makes the majority of viennoiseries.

That's it, we've done the grand tour (I'm deliberately leaving out bread and pizza doughs), and here you have the essentials of the doughs you could make at home, or perhaps already do.

I hope I've made you want to knead, or at least made you hungry...

Lasts posts

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 20267595

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 20269725

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 20253,0335

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 20251,9785

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 20251,796

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

No need to boil gelatin

Gelatin is a magical ingredient for making light, creamy, structured desserts, yet it's often misused in the kitchen. A common mistake in some recipes is the idea that it needs to be boiled for it to work properly, but this is a mistake indeed: gelatin melts at a much lower temperature, around...
November 21^th 20249,6045

The art of the charlotte

In cooking, a charlotte is a delicious moulded dessert, with biscuits around the outside that have been soaked in a flavoured syrup, filled with a light cream or mousse. The charlotte is left to set in the fridge before being turned out and served in slices. It is very light and a lovely sweet...
February 27^th 201347 K4.3

Making the most of seeds: Dry roasting

In cooking, and particularly in baking, there are a lot of seeds we can use, such as linseed, sesame, poppy, etc. Usually, recipes simply say to add them just as they are to the mixture or dough. To make a seeded loaf, for example, prepare a plain bread dough as usual, then, towards the end of...
January 30^th 201564 K4.0

Good fridge management

We all have a fridge at home – it's an indispensible part of the kitchen and so much a part of the furniture that we tend not to pay it much attention. But often, out of habit, we don't use it properly. Here are a few tips to help you get more from your fridge. .
April 19^th 201130 K4.4

Different kinds of pastry and dough

When cooking in general, and particularly in baking, we can make and use many different kinds of pastry and dough. All built on the same "base": flour - a powder to which we add fat, liquid or both to produce the dough which is then cooked. .
November 6^th 2012112 K 14.0