Delicious pastries do not leave anyone indifferent. The quality and taste of any pastry depends largely on the dough from which it is made. This product is a semi-finished product based on flour, milk or water, yeast, butter, eggs, sugar and salt. It is a homogeneous mixture of ingredients that, after baking, turns into an airy and crispy bread crust.
On the basis of this product, various products are made in the confectionery and bakery industry with the addition of sweet or salty fillings. At home, housewives bake pies, pancakes, pizza, dumplings, dumplings and much more from ready-made dough. For different dishes, various types of this product are used, the number of which in cooking reaches dozens.
Any dough contains in its composition carbohydrates, protein, fats, salts, acids and other substances necessary for the life of the human body.
Product Varieties
It is almost impossible to describe all possible types of dough, since each housewife has her own subtleties and secrets of preparing this semi-finished product. Basically, all dough in cooking is divided into yeast and yeast-free. By the name, it becomes clear that yeast is prepared on the basis of yeast, and yeast-free, respectively, without them. On an industrial scale and in home cooking, both types are used. Yeast is more often used to prepare the base of pies and bread, and yeast-free – for pancakes, cakes and cookies.
In industry, when baking rye bread, the dough is made on the basis of bread sourdough, and for white wheat bread it is made using the sponge method, for which a special dough is prepared before kneading, which must be infused for a certain time.
Culinary specialists include biscuit, rich, puff, custard and shortbread types to yeast-free dough. A distinctive feature of all types of yeast-free dough is the porosity of the product structure, which is necessary for hot air to better penetrate the product and help it bake. For this purpose, special ingredients are added to the yeast-free product – baking powder. In the yeast version, the yeast itself acts as a baking powder, so no additional ingredients are required in its recipe.
When baking products from yeast-free dough, it is necessary to use mechanical leavening and chemical leavening agents in the composition. The most common chemical leavening agents for a yeast-free product are water and ammonium carbonate. At elevated temperatures, these leavening agents release carbon dioxide, which allows baking to become airy.
Among the mechanical methods for loosening, culinary specialists distinguish rolling and whipping. Rolling is used when it is necessary to prepare puff pastry, and whipping is used when making a biscuit product. In addition, milk and chicken eggs additionally contain substances that help the dough become more porous. Therefore, the use of these ingredients can also be attributed to the methods of mechanical loosening.
For Slavic cuisine, the yeast type of dough is more characteristic and traditional. In manuscripts of the 16th and 17th centuries, for the first time, there are references to puff pastry, while simple unleavened dough was mentioned in ancient Slavic sources much earlier. And to this day it is used in the manufacture of dumplings and dumplings, noodles and other dishes.
With a yeast-based product, the yeast itself is needed to ferment carbohydrates to form carbon dioxide, which in turn, as already mentioned, acts as a leavening agent for the texture of the product. For a good development of the yeast structure, a temperature of about 37 degrees and a liquid consistency are required. If the temperature significantly exceeds or does not reach the mark of 37 degrees, as well as if there are eggs, a large amount of sugar or fat in the recipe, the development of yeast slows down.
The main varieties of dough used today in cooking include:
- biscuit, from which confectioners and housewives bake cakes, biscuits, rolls or pastries;
- pancake dough;
- yeast for bread and pies;
- custard, used for baking eclairs, as well as Borodino bread;
- shortbread, which is used as a base for cakes and cookies;
- the usual unleavened, on the basis of which the housewives prepare dumplings, dumplings, pizza and many other dishes;
- rich – in which there are a lot of rich ingredients (eggs, butter and sugar);
- puff for puffs and meat pies;
- air, enriched with baking powder or loosened using the above techniques, for cakes and pastries;
- sugar, which is used for decorating cakes and pastries with sugar figurines.
Recipes and kneading secrets
At home, it is very important to be able to properly prepare both yeast and yeast-free types of dough. For different dishes, different recipes are suitable, which will be ideally combined with fillings and cooking techniques. It is only important to know a few secrets of a delicious product.
So, to cook a delicious thin-based pizza at home, you need to take the following ingredients for the dough:
- 2 / 3 a glass of water;
- a teaspoon of dry yeast;
- 2 cup of flour;
- a teaspoon of salt;
- a tablespoon of olive oil.
When making pizza dough, it is important to oxygenate the flour by sifting it. This will give the product softness and airiness. Yeast must be chosen proven so as not to spoil the dish with unraised yeast. After the dough is kneaded, you need to remove it to a place where there is no draft, otherwise it will not rise. The water for cooking should be cool, but not icy. This water temperature will provide the product with elasticity. If the hostess prepares pizza, then she should not roll out the dough for her. To saturate the product with oxygen, it must be stretched from the center to the edges of the formation. When laying the yeast dough in a pizza baking dish, the edges must be made thicker so that the sides can be formed, and the base is usually greased with vegetable oil and sprinkled with a little flour before laying out the product.
To prepare the base for pizza, you must sequentially perform the following steps:
- Yeast is poured and dissolved in warm water so that there are no lumps.
- For kneading in a container, diluted yeast, salt and flour are combined and the process begins.
- After the main kneading, the dough is laid out on a dry, floured surface, and they begin to knead, gradually adding flour to the composition until the product becomes elastic and soft.
- The finished dough is smeared with olive oil and laid out in a clean container.
- The container with the product should be covered with cling film and put in a warm place for an hour and a half until the mass doubles.
- The risen dough is kneaded and divided into 2 equal parts, which are rolled into balls.
- The balls are laid out on a surface sprinkled with flour, covered with a film and reach within an hour.
When baking puff pastry treats, it is important to remember several features of its preparation. First, it is always necessary to observe the proportions of the products indicated in the recipe. Vinegar, citric acid and salt not only change the taste of the product, but also affect its elasticity. Secondly, using milk in the recipe, it should be diluted in half with plain water. Thus, it is possible to improve the elasticity of the resulting product. Thirdly, it is important that the cooking oil is chilled, but not frozen, otherwise it will not be able to organically interfere with the texture.
The number of layers for puff pastry plays a huge role. To increase this indicator, it is necessary to try to roll out the prepared dough as many times as possible, and this must be done with uniform pressure. Before the finished raw dish is sent to the oven, it is important to make cuts on the dough through which hot steam can escape. It is necessary to bake dishes based on puff pastry at high temperatures, since at an indicator below 220 degrees the layers will not rise.
To make delicious puff pastry, you need:
- Pour 150 grams of flour on a dry surface, make a depression in the middle, drive an egg into it, pour in 2 tablespoons of milk, a teaspoon of vinegar and a pinch of salt. Mix all this thoroughly and start kneading until bubbles form.
- 150 grams of butter should be cut into small cubes and covered with 150 grams of flour. The ingredients are thoroughly mixed.
- The vinegar dough is rolled out in a thin layer, in the middle of which the butter dough is laid out. The layer is wrapped in the form of an envelope and rolled out, sprinkled with flour and put aside folded several times in the refrigerator for half an hour.
- Repeat rolling 4 more times, after each time the product must be folded and sent to cool for 10 minutes.
- From the prepared dough, the necessary parts for baking are cut out and filled with fillings. The dishes are baked in an oven preheated to 220 degrees until cooked.
For sweet homemade pastries, most often they prepare delicious shortbread dough, which is easy to make. Butter, as in the case of puff pastry, should not be very frozen when preparing shortcrust pastry. It must be put more so that the product is crumbly. At the same time, the butter is not mixed with flour, but is ground to make a kind of crumb. The duration of this process should not be too long so that the oil does not begin to melt. The water for the recipe should be chilled, but not ice cold. But it is better not to use sugar – to make the product more tender, you need to take powdered sugar.
The main ingredients for shortbread dough at home are: 2 cups flour, ½ cup sugar, 150 grams of butter, a pinch of salt and vanilla.
According to the recipe, mix flour, vanilla, salt and sugar. Oil, chopped into small cubes, is added to the mixture, and everything is ground to a crumb state. Next, water is introduced into the mass and the mass is quickly kneaded. All this happens at a low air temperature, otherwise the oil will begin to melt. From the kneaded dough, you need to form a ball, which is wrapped in a film and put in the refrigerator for half an hour. After that, the ball is rolled out, cut into the desired shapes and laid out on a baking sheet. Such baking is being prepared at 180-200 degrees.
The above and any other types of dough allow housewives to constantly prepare new culinary masterpieces. Main dishes, bread and desserts are simply unthinkable without the production of this product, which is why it is so important to learn how to cook it correctly.