Pastry is the name given to various kinds of baked products made from ingredients such as flour, sugar, milk, butter, shortening, baking powder, and/or eggs. Small tarts and other sweet baked products are called "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.
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, or short, pastry is the simplest and most common pastry. It is made with flour, fat, butter, salt, and water.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 and results in a soft, tender pastry. A related type is the sweetened sweetcrust pastry.
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 beginning the baking process with a high temperature and lowering the temperature to finish.
Puff pastry
Puff pastry has many layers that cause it to expand or “puff” when baked. Pastries are made using flour, butter, salt, and water. Pastry rises up due to the combination and reaction of the four ingredients and also from the air that gets between the layers. 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. The pastry is filled with various flavors of cream and is often topped with chocolate. Choux pastries can also be filled with ingredients such as cheese, tuna, or chicken to be used as appetizers.
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.
History
uropean traditions of pastry-making is often traced back to the short crust era flaky doughs that were in use throughout the Mediterranean in ancient times.
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.
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.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" 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.
