Pastries
While pastries are a part of a baker’s offerings, surprisingly enough they don’t necessarily have to be sweet. In fact, pastries come in a variety of sizes, shapes, flavours and textures. What's more, they're made from ingredients such as flour, sugar, milk, butter, shortening, baking powder and eggs.
Fat content
Pastries are different from bread in that they have higher fat content, which gives them a flakier, more crumbly texture.
The perfect pastry is light and airy, but firm enough to be able to support any filling it might have.
Fats for pastries:
The pros: Oil combines with flour and water very easily to create a dough. More flavorful oils like olive can add a rich, unique flavour to crusts, especially those meant for savoury quiches or tarts.
The cons: Using oil creates a mealy, breakable dough that is more difficult to roll out and transfer into a pie pan. The resulting crust will be crumbly and tender, and not as flaky as crusts made of other fats.
THE FIVE BASIC TYPES OF PASTIES
The five basic types of pastries are short crust pastry, filo pastry, choux pastry, flaky pastry, and puff pastry.
These pastry types are combined with various ingredients and flavors around the world to create such cultural staples as samosas in India, empanadas in Spain, pain au chocolat in France and spanakopita in Greece.
In North America, however, the word "pastry" has a slightly different connotation. Here are our top 10 versions of what it means:
Croissants
A type of puff pastry from France, croissants are a rich, flaky roll named for their distinct crescent shape.
Typically eaten at breakfast, croissants can be made by layering yeast-leavened dough with butter and combined with cheese or chocolate.
Pies
A pie is a baked dish of fruit, meat, or vegetables, typically made of a pastry-dough crust and often topped with pastry.
While apple pie is a fixture in North American culture, other popular pie flavours include cherry, peach, pecan, and blueberry.
Danishes
A sweet pastry and speciality of Denmark, danishes are a popular breakfast buffet item, available in flavours like apple, cherry, chocolate and cheese.
When baked correctly, they are fluffy and crispy on the outside, and buttery and flaky on the inside.
Macarons
Macarons (not to be confused with macaroons) are a sweet French meringue-based confection made with egg whites, sugar and almonds, sandwiched around a layer of ganache or buttercream.
They are round and bite-sized and come in a wide variety of colors and flavours, like pistachio, rose, and salted caramel.
Éclairs
An oblong, hollow pastry made with choux dough and filled with custard or chocolate-flavoured cream, éclairs are a staple at any gourmet bakery or French pâtisserie.
They are topped with fondant icing — the same type of icing that is commonly used on profiteroles.
Strudels
A German type of layered pastry, strudels are made with filo pastry and a filling that is usually sweet.
Popular varieties include apple, cheese, and sour cherry. They are often served with cream.
Cannoli
Cannoli originate from Italy and are made with a tube-like shell of fried pastry dough filled with a creamy, sweet filling usually made with ricotta cheese.
They can range in size no bigger than a finger to as large as a fist.
Pretzels
Unmistakeable with their unique knotted shape, pretzels are made with the baked dough in both soft and hard varieties.
Originating in Europe, pretzels can be made with both sweet and savoury flavours and a variety of toppings and coatings.
Tarts
A baked dish made with a filling over a pastry base, tarts (unlike pies) has an open-top.
Traditionally baked with shortcrust pastry, tarts can be made with sweet ingredients like custard and fruit, or savoury ingredients (often called quiches).
Profiteroles
Called cream puffs in the United States, profiteroles are a French dessert made with choux pastry balls filled with whipped cream, pastry cream, custard, or ice cream.
The puffs may be left plain or topped with powdered sugar, fondant icing, or chocolate ganache.
PASTRIES
What is the full meaning of pastries? Pastry is a food made from flour, fat, and water that is mixed together, rolled flat, and baked in the oven.
What are the types of pastries? There are five basic types of pastry (a food that combines flour and fat); these are short crust pastry, filo pastry, choux pastry, flaky pastry and puff pastry.
How are pastries made? Pastry is a type of dough made with flour, water and shortening. Baked pastry dough can be sweet or savory and consumed alone or with fillings. Pastry is characterized by its flaky and crumbly texture, and rich buttery flavor.
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What are the 3 types of pastry dough?
Brisée
This is the most basic of our three crusts and contains only flour, butter, salt, and cold water making it great for savory bakes. Think of it as the standard French crust. The ingredients are very similar to our American flaky pie dough but the incorporation of ingredients are slightly different. With American pastry, we emphasize the “rubbing in” of cold butter into flour which gives us that irregular flaky texture. While the French also mix their butter into flour while it’s still cold, they generally rely on the use of a standing mixer. Sometimes going as far as adding an egg yolk (in which case the crust is then referred to as a pâte à foncer). These slight alterations yield a crust with a finer, stronger, crumb, which is much more uniform but lacks the flaky quality of its American counterpart.
Great for: Savory meat pies and quiche
Sucrée
Think sugar when making a paté sucrée, its name even means “sweet dough” in French. Very similar to the paté brisée ingredient-wise, the sucrée differs slightly when it comes to method. When making the sucrée you cream together the butter and sugar, then add the egg and flour. What you get is a light, crisp dough. With a tight cookie-like crumb that’s strong enough to hold liquid fillings without the worry of leakage.
Great for: Cream pies, chocolate ganache pies, and fruit curd tarts.
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Sablée
The richest of our three doughs the sablée is one of the most delicious and one of the most difficult crusts to work with. Sablée is reminiscent of a good shortbread, both in flavor and in its rough-on-the-tongue texture. Like the sucrée, it is a sweet dough and generally utilized for a lot of the same dishes. The method is also similar to the sucrée as it too uses the creaming method. However, the end result could not be less similar. Sablée is named after the French verb “sabler” meaning to “make sandy” and its texture is truly a crumbly “sandy” product. The addition of almond flour in many sablée recipes undermines gluten formation even further and adds to that delicate texture, making sablée sometimes difficult to roll out. When lining a tart tin we actually suggest pressing the dough in, instead of rolling the dough and transferring it as you might with other doughs.
Great for: Fruit Tarts
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