If you are looking for the perfect pastry for your customers, you should know the basics first. Whether you work in the foodservice industry, especially a bakery, patisserie, or café, the following guidance on preparing the perfect pastry is your ticket to success.
Pastries are essentially doughs produced from butter, flour, and water, occasionally adding eggs. Surprisingly, some of the world's most luxurious and adored desserts, such as pies, tarts, croissants, eclairs, strudels, and more, are made with only a few simple ingredients.
Types of pastries
There are varieties of pastries you can explore. The most popular are:
Puff pastry
Puff pastry gets constructed with layers of dough and butter rolled together and then overlapped, earning it the title of King of Pastries for its unmatched rise and picture-perfect construction. As the dough sandwich bakes, the trapped air between the layers expands, causing the crust to rise and create gaps that give the puff pastry its airy, flaky texture.
The delicate structure, prominent in many French cuisines, works well as a pie topping or a flat base for dry ingredients.
Shortcrust pastry
This is the most popular and simple to make desserts. It gets made using butter, flour, and enough water to keep it together. The ingredients get combined, kneaded briefly, refrigerated, and then rolled as biscuits, pies, quiches, tarts, and other beloved desserts.
Pate sucrée
You can make a sweeter and richer shortcrust pastry as pate sucrée by simply adding sugar and egg yolks to your classic recipe. They are known for being at the top of their game when it comes to pastry.
Rough puff pastry
Rough puff, also known as flaky pastry, is made from huge lumps of shortening that keep the layers of dough apart, resulting in a light and flaky pastry that get used to producing different lunch and dinner dishes.
Choux pastry
This French treat is made using flour, butter, and water, with eggs for additional leavening and richness. Choux pastry fills delectable delicacies like éclairs and cream puffs with piped creams using pastry bags.
Hot water crust pastry
They are the finest choice for meat pies and other recipes that require tougher crust handling saucy or dense fillings. These recipes demand butter to be melted in a high concentration of warm water. Therefore, you need a versatile pastry that is simple to shape and manipulate.
Phyllo pastry
The dough, made from flour, water, salt, and a little oil, differs from puff and shortcrust doughs with less fat. This produces thin, flaky layers that rip or tear when handled. Wrap layers of phyllo dough around your choice filling and brush with butter before baking, as is typical with dry fillings.