1,592 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 77 videos

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 Comments Lasts posts Follow

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

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

With vinegar?

When you buy a jar of pickles labeled “in vinegar,” you’re looking for their tangy, crunchy flavor to go with cold cuts, sandwiches, or salads. You expect to find small gherkins preserved in vinegar, with salt and herbs, but is that really the case?
July 15^th 20261,2694.8

Congratulate the chef

You've just finished a meal that you really enjoyed. The server approaches with the usual question: “How was it?” And then, as a natural reflex, you simply reply, “Yes, it was very good.” However, when the meal was truly outstanding, this brief exchange deserves a little more. .
July 7^th 2026892 25

Cut twice as fast

When you need to cut something long into small pieces, for example chopped chives or the stem of a spring onion, there's a simple gesture that doubles your cutting speed. Let's see how.
May 21^th 20262,2175

The other use for bowl scraper

Your kitchen or bakery utensils may include a horn (left) or a pastry cutter (right). These practical utensils are normally used to scoop the contents of a bowl or salad bowl - the horn - or to cut dough - the pastry cutter. But they also have another, very practical use - let's see what it is.
May 9^th 20262,0283

The strange foam of potatoes in milk

As you may have already noticed, when you cook potatoes in milk, especially in small pieces (slices or cubes) for a gratin for example, a surprisingly abundant white foam forms on the surface. Where does it come from?
April 26^th 20262,3805

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Butter doesn't make you fat, unless you eat too much of it.

Whenever I'm discussing cooking and recipes, there is one idea which comes up frequently, like this: "Oh no! But that's got butter in it" (I should add, for the sake of accuracy, that this is something I hear more frequently from women, who are almost all concerned with keeping their figure). ...
March 26^th 201247 K4.5

The skin of the almonds

If you like almonds, in their dried fruit version, you must use them quite often in cooking or baking, whether powdered or whole. It is not obvious, but in fact there is 2 kinds of almonds in the market, wholesale with or without the skin. .
February 8^th 202025 K4.7

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 202141 K4.5

How to break eggs properly?

It is a very common gesture in pastry, bakery and of course cooking: breaking eggs to incorporate them into a recipe. You have eggs (which professionals call "shell eggs" to differentiate them from liquid eggs in cartons or cans), and you must break them to incorporate the contents into your...
June 26^th 202117 K4.8

The window-pane test in bread-making

The home bread-makers often ask themselves “Have I kneaded my dough long enough?” . A good question, as dough that is insufficiently kneaded will not rise properly or will fall flat when the top is slashed, which is very frustrating. To know when the dough is ready, one can rely on the length...
June 16^th 202199 K 23.9