1,539 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.

13 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

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 20259645

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 20251,0915

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 2025988

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 20252,7035

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 20257,5173

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

Circles vs. moulds tins

If you like to bake or make quiches, pies etc. you must surely have one or more pie pans at home, in different diameters and perhaps materials. They are indispensable, without them there is no way to make beautiful pies, and they work very well, but you have another option, instead of moulds,...
October 2^nd 202016 K5

A few tips for effective kneading at home

When you have to knead dough for bread or some other recipe, you may well use a food processor or the type of machine known as a stand mixer. The best-known brands are Kenwood and KitchenAid. They are useful tools, but here are a few tips to help you get the best out of them.
June 23^th 2021284 K 23.8

The beautiful story of the croissants

As you may have already noticed, cooking, baking and pastry-making are full of stories or legends, usually very romantic, about this or that product or recipe. This is often the case for named recipes, for example tarte tatin, peach melba, paris-brest and many others, but it also applies to very...
October 10^th 201819 K5

For well opened (puffed) cakes

It's always nice to have a well puffed up cake after baking, not only will it taste good but it looks great too. Let's see how to get this beautiful shape almost every time.
January 23^th 201935 K4.2

Toss the salad

When you've finished preparing a salad, green or otherwise, it's usually time to add the dressing and toss. It's often said to "toss the salad", which means to season and mix. Is it easy? Not so easy...
March 8^th 202412 K5