Pastry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the food. For the distributed hash table system, see Pastry (DHT).
Palmier pastries
|
|
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Main ingredient(s) | Often flour, sugar, milk, butter or shortening, baking powder, eggs |
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2008) |
See also: List of pastries
Pastry may also refer to the dough from which such baked products are made. Pastry dough is rolled out thinly and used as a base for baked products. Common pastry dishes include pies, tarts, quiches and pasties.[1][2]
Pastry is differentiated from bread by having a higher fat content, which contributes to a flaky or crumbly texture. A good pastry is light and airy and fatty, but firm enough to support the weight of the filling. When making a shortcrust pastry, care must be taken to blend the fat and flour thoroughly before adding any liquid. This ensures that the flour granules are adequately coated with fat and less likely to develop gluten. On the other hand, overmixing results in long gluten strands that toughen the pastry. In other types of pastry, such as Danish pastry and croissants, the characteristic flaky texture is achieved by repeatedly rolling out a dough similar to that for yeast bread, spreading it with butter, and folding it to produce many thin layers of folds.
Main types of pastry
- Shortcrust pastry
- Shortcrust, pastry is the simplest and most common pastry. It is made with flour, fat, butter, salt, and water to bind the dough.[3] This is used mainly in tarts. It is also the pastry that is used most often in making a quiche. The process of making pastry includes mixing of the fat and flour, adding water, and rolling out the paste. The fat is mixed with the flour first, generally by rubbing with fingers or a pastry blender, which inhibits gluten formation by coating the gluten strands in fat and results in a short (as in crumbly; hence the term shortcrust), tender pastry.[4] A related type is the sweetened sweetcrust pastry, also known as paté sucrée, which has the addition of sugar and egg yolks (rather than water to bind the pastry).[5]
- Flaky pastry
- Flaky pastry is a simple pastry that expands when cooked due to the number of layers. It bakes into a crisp, buttery pastry. The "puff" is obtained by the shard like layers of fat, most often butter or shortening, which created layers and expand in the heat of the oven when baked.
- Puff pastry
- Puff pastry has many layers that cause it to expand or “puff” when baked. Puff pastry is made using flour, butter, salt, and water. The pastry rises up due to the water and fats expanding as they turn into steam upon heating.[5] Puff pastries come out of the oven light, flaky, and tender.
- Choux pastry
- Choux pastry is a very light pastry that is often filled with cream. Unlike other types of pastry, choux is in fact closer to a dough before cooked which gives it the ability to be piped into variouts shapes such as the eclair and profiterole. Its name originates from the French choux, meaning cabbage, owing to its rough cabbage-like shape after cooking.[6]
- Phyllo (Filo)
- Phyllo is a paper-thin pastry dough, used in many layers. The phyllo is generally wrapped around a filling and brushed with butter before baking. These pastries are very delicate and flaky.[8]
Background
Pastries go back to the ancient Mediterranean with almost paper-thin, multi-layered baklava and filo. Northern Europe took on pastry-making after the Crusaders brought it back from the Mediterranean. French and Italian Renaissance chefs eventually perfected the Puff and Choux pastries, while 17th and 18th century chefs brought new recipes to the table.[9] These new pastries included brioche, Napoleons, cream puffs, and éclairs. French chef Antonin Carême reportedly was the first to incorporate art in pastry making.[10]Definitions
- Pastry: A type of food in famous dishes like pie and strudel.
- Pastry bag or Piping bag: An often cone shaped bag that is used to make an even stream of dough, frosting, or flavored substance, to form a structure, decorate a baked good, or fill a pastry with a custard, cream, jelly, or other filling.
- Pastry board: A square or oblong board preferably marble but usually wood on which pastry is rolled out.
- Pastry brake: Opposed and contra-rotating rollers with a variable gap through which pastry can be worked and reduced in thickness for commercial production. A very small version is used domestically for pasta production.
- Pastry case: An uncooked or blind baked pastry container used to hold savory or sweet mixtures.
- Pastry cream: Confectioner's custard. An egg and flour thickened custard made with sweetened milk flavored with vanilla. Used as a filling for flans, cakes, pastries, tarts, etc. The flour prevents the egg from curdling.
- Pastry cutters: Various metal or plastic outlines of shapes, e.g. circles fluted circles, diamonds, ginger bread men, etc. Sharpened on one edge and used to cut out corresponding shapes from biscuit, scone, pastry, or cakes mixtures.[11]
- Pastry blender: A kitchen implement used to properly combine the fat and flour. Usually constructed of wire or plastic, with multiple wires or small blades connected to a handle.
- Viennoiserie: French term for "Viennese pastry," which although technically must be yeast raised,[12] it has now become used as a common term for many laminated and puff- and choux-based pastries, including croissants, brioche, and pain au chocolat.[13]
Chemistry of a pastry
Different kinds of pastries are made by the nature of wheat flour and also due to certain types of fats. When wheat flour is kneaded into plain dough and made with water it develops strands of gluten, which are what make the bread tough and elastic. In a typical pastry, however, this toughness is unwanted so fat or oil is put in to slow down the development of gluten. It is common to use lard or suet here because they have a coarse, crystalline structure that is very effective. Using only unclarified butter does not always work well because of its water content; clarified butter is virtually water free. Shortcrust pastry using only butter may develop an inferior texture. If the fat is melted with hot water, or if liquid oil is used, the thin oily layer between the grains offers less obstacle to gluten formation and the resulting pastry is tougher.[14]History
In the ancient Mediterranean, the Romans, Greeks and Phoenicians all had filo-style pastries in their culinary traditions. There is also strong evidence that Egyptians produced pastry-like confections. They had professional bakers that surely had the skills to do so, and they also had needed materials like flour, oil, and honey.[citation needed] In the plays of Aristophanes, in 5th century BC, there are mentions of sweetmeats including small pastries filled with fruit. The Roman cuisine used flour, oil and water to make pastries that were used to cover meats and fowls. They did this during baking to keep in the juices, but this was not meant to be eaten by people. A pastry that was meant to be eaten was a richer pastry that was made into small pastries and contained eggs or little birds. It was often served at banquets. Greeks and Roman both struggled in making a good pastry because they both used oil in the cooking process and oil causes the pastry to lose its stiffness.[15]
In medieval cuisine of North Europe they were able to produce nice, stiff pastries because they cooked with shortening and butter. There were some incomplete lists of ingredients found in medieval cookbooks, but no full, detailed versions. There were stiff, empty pastries called coffins or 'huff paste', that were eaten by servants only and included an egg yolk glaze to help make them more enjoyable to consume. Medieval pastries also included small tarts to add richness to the snack.
It was not until about the Mid 16th century that actual pastry recipes showed up.[14][16] These recipes were adopted and adapted over time in various European countries, resulting in the myriad pastry traditions known to the region, from Portuguese "pastéis de nata" in the west to Russian "pirozhky" in the east. The use of chocolate in pastry-making in the West, so commonplace today, arose only after Spanish and Portuguese traders brought chocolate to Europe from the New World starting in the 16th century. Many culinary historians consider French pastry chef Antonin Carême (1784–1833) to have been the first great master of pastry making in modern times.
Pastry-making also has a strong tradition in many parts of Asia. Chinese pastry is made from rice, or different types of flour, with fruit, sweet bean paste or sesame-based fillings. Beginning in the 19th century, the British brought western-style pastry to the far east, though it would be the French influenced Maxim in the 1950s that made western pastry popular in Chinese-speaking regions starting with Hong Kong. Still, the term "Western Cake" (西餅) is used to differentiate between the automatically assumed Chinese pastry. Other Asian countries such as Korea have traditionally prepared pastry-confections such as tteok, hangwa, and yaksik with flour, rice, fruits, and regional specific ingredients to make unique type desserts. And Japan also has specialized pastry-confections better known as mochi and manjū. Pastry-confection that originate in Asia are clearly distinct from those that originate in the West that are generally much sweeter.
