FIVE BASIC TYPES OF PASTRY

Creating pastries was originally done by ancient Egyptians. Ancient Rome and Greece’s classical period had pastries made of seeds, flour almonds and honey. Since sugar was used for European cookery, several new pastry recipes in Switzerland, Spain, Italy and France. Marie-Antoine Carême was a great innovator who achieved the perfection of puff pastry and made detailed patisserie designs.

A number of dishes like pies have pastry casing that completely contains or covers a filling of different savory or sweet ingredients. Several pastries are created with the use of shortening, any fat food product which is solid in room temperature. Shortening’s composition lends to the production of shortcrust style crumbly pastry crusts and pastries.

The five fundamental types of pastry are choux pastry, filo pastry, shortcrust pastry, puff pastry and flaky pastry.

Choux Pastry

Choux pastry, also known as pâte à choux, is light dough for creating St. Honoré cake, profiteroles, éclairs, beignets, gougères, croquembouches, Indonesian kue sus and. It consists of flour, eggs, butter and water. Similar to David Eyre's pancake or Like Yorkshire Pudding, choux pastry uses high moisture content as alternative to raising agent to be able to create steam while cooking so the pastry can be puffed. Usually choux pastry is baked but it is fried for beignets. In Latin America and Spain, churos are created from fried choux pastry which is sugared and immersed in chocolate blancmange and served for breakfast. In Austria, it is boiled to create the sweet apricot dumpling Marillenknödel; in this instance, it does not puff but is still relatively dense. Sometimes, they are filled with cream to create éclairs or cream puffs.

Filo pastry

Fil, fillo or phyllo is from a Greek word which means filo leaf. Originated from Greece, filo pastry is a thin pastry used in cheese, vegetable, egg, meat and several sweet dishes.  Creation of this needs enough ingredients, time and proper handling.

The process of stretching raw dough to create paper thin pastry sheets may have came from the kitchens of Topkapi Palace in Turkey. Yufka can be "an early form of filo" because the Turkic dialects dictionary by Mahmud Kashgari called Diwan Lughat al-Turk recorded folded or pleated bread as a meaning for the term yuvgha, which is associated to yufka, which means "thin",  and also the modern Turkish name pertaining to phyllo and a Turkish flat bread also referred to as yufka.

Shortcrust pastry

Shortcrust pastry is the kind of pastry commonly used as a base of pie, quiche or tart. It doesn’t have leavening agent thus it doesn’t puff up while baking. However, a shortcrust pastry can be created using self-raising flour. Shortcrust pastry can be employed when baking savory sweet pies like chicken pie, apple pie, lemon meringue or quiche. A lot of shortcrust pastries are created with the use of vegetable shortening, a name for a fat food product which is solid at room temperature. The composition of vegetable shortening helps to create crumbly pastry.

Puff Pastry

A puff pastry refers to a light, flaky, leavened  pastry consisting of many layers of fat with a solid state at a temperature of  20 °C (68 °F). When raw, puff pastry is a dough covered with solid fat and for many times folded and rolled out (not mashed since the  layering will be destroyed) . Sometimes it is referred to as détrempe or "water dough". The gaps that develops between the layers were formed because the puff pastry rises as the water evaporates as steam while baking. Excessive puffing will be prevented by piercing the dough and the layers will stop from flaking to the edges by crimping along the sides.

Flaky pastry

A flaky pastry is also light and flaky like like puff pastry , but it is unleavened. Large chunks of shortening (about 1-in./2½ cm. across) are combined with the dough whereas in puff pastry, large rectangle of shortening is used. Next, the dough is rolled and folded same with the puff pastry. The lump of shortening makes the rolled dough particles remain separated from each other in order that when the dough is finally baked they turn into flakes. Thus the texture is varied from puff pastry, wherein rectangles of fat and dough are rolled then folded together hence the outcome are uniformed pastry sheets. The flaky pastry is used in making plates, turnovers, sausage rolls and pasties.