Pastries. They are everywhere. Haunting the foodie souls in coffee shops and tantalizing the hungry with their glistening, flaky layers unveiling a seductive filling. Now I am a big fan of pastries, I love how airy and crispy the layers are. It's kind of like eating mostly air. Which is why I can eat five of them and not gain an ounce. Right?
Pastries and bread are very very different from each other. A slice of sandwich bread and a danish pastry look nothing alike. They do not taste similar either. Why the difference? The main difference between bread and pastries is not the ingredients, but the amount of ingredients. Each recipe will call for water, but the amount of water used will have a large impact on the resulting baked good. Pastry dough uses significantly less water than bread dough. The water is used just to hold all the ingredients together, not to activate the gluten like in other types of bread dough.
Pastry dough also uses more fats than regular bread dough. It is the use of fat that further keeps the dough from falling apart. When a pastry is baking most of the water in the dough is evaporated. This leaves the finished product dry and crumbly. The pastry, however, will not be bland because of the extensive use of fat. When biting into a pastry the outer, flaky shell protects a more delicate and buttery inside.
What are common pastries? Most of the time a true pastry is not eaten by itself. Instead, pastries usually take the form of a container for a variety of fillings. For instance pastry dough can be used as a crust for quiche, meat pies, fruit pies and tartes, and custards. The commonly assumed pastries like croissants and Danish pastries are really a bread-pastry hybrid (McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York: Scribner, 2004).
There are several different types of pastries, each serving a particular purpose.
Pastries and bread are very very different from each other. A slice of sandwich bread and a danish pastry look nothing alike. They do not taste similar either. Why the difference? The main difference between bread and pastries is not the ingredients, but the amount of ingredients. Each recipe will call for water, but the amount of water used will have a large impact on the resulting baked good. Pastry dough uses significantly less water than bread dough. The water is used just to hold all the ingredients together, not to activate the gluten like in other types of bread dough.
Pastry dough also uses more fats than regular bread dough. It is the use of fat that further keeps the dough from falling apart. When a pastry is baking most of the water in the dough is evaporated. This leaves the finished product dry and crumbly. The pastry, however, will not be bland because of the extensive use of fat. When biting into a pastry the outer, flaky shell protects a more delicate and buttery inside.
What are common pastries? Most of the time a true pastry is not eaten by itself. Instead, pastries usually take the form of a container for a variety of fillings. For instance pastry dough can be used as a crust for quiche, meat pies, fruit pies and tartes, and custards. The commonly assumed pastries like croissants and Danish pastries are really a bread-pastry hybrid (McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York: Scribner, 2004).
There are several different types of pastries, each serving a particular purpose.
- Crumbly pastries: The "short pastry" usually tear apart into irregualr pieces
- Flaky pastries: These tear apart into irregular, thin flakes. For example, the American pie crusts.
- Laminated pastries: Constructed of very thin layers that shatter in the mouth, like phyllo sheets, streudel, and puff pastry.
- Laminated breads: A hybrid of the thin layers of the laminated pastries with the soft texture of bread, like the croissant.
* Source: McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York: Scribner, 2004.
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