🍞 Baking Basics: The 5 Doughs Every Chef Should Master
👨🍳Dough Is Discipline
Every chef has a station they fear just a little. For some, it’s the grill at full send. For others, it’s pastry. Why? Because dough doesn’t lie. It won’t save you with salt or butter or garnish. It demands patience, timing, and respect. And when you master it, it rewards you with structure, aroma, and that quiet moment of pride when you pull perfection out of the oven.
These five essential types of dough aren’t just recipes — they’re fundamental techniques that unlock everything from rustic loaves to elegant pastry towers. If you want to level up your kitchen game, this is where it starts.
🥧 1. Shortcrust Dough – The Foundation of Flaky
Used for tarts, quiches, and pies, shortcrust is buttery, tender, and barely sweet (or savory, if that’s the move). The key? Cold butter, minimal mixing, and resting time.
Core Ingredients: flour, cold butter, water, salt
🔥 Chef Tip: Don’t overwork — you want crumbs, not gluten. Blind bake when needed.
🧈 2. Puff Pastry – Lamination Nation
This dough is all about layers. Folded and rolled with butter again and again, puff pastry gives you a crisp, flaky, sky-high rise that screams technique. It’s labor-intensive but worth it.
Core Ingredients: flour, butter, water, salt
🔥 Chef Tip: Keep everything cold and rest between turns. Chill = clean lift.
🍩 3. Choux Dough – Steam-Driven Showstopper
Choux is weird — and brilliant. It starts on the stove, not in the bowl. Once piped, it puffs using the power of steam, creating éclairs, profiteroles, and even gougères.
Core Ingredients: flour, butter, water, eggs
🔥 Chef Tip: Dry the dough on heat before adding eggs. Pipe on parchment and don’t open that oven too soon.
🍞 4. Bread Dough – The Living One
Bread is alive. Literally. Yeast does the heavy lifting, creating air, flavor, and structure. You can go lean (just flour, water, salt, yeast) or enrich it with fats and sugars.
Core Ingredients: flour, yeast, water, salt (plus optional sugar, fat)
🔥 Chef Tip: Master bulk fermentation and folding — it’s more than just a rise.
🍕 5. Pizza Dough – The Neapolitan Workhorse
Good pizza dough balances elasticity and chew with crisp edges and blistered air bubbles. You want extensibility but not stickiness, and that comes from flour choice and fermentation time.
Core Ingredients: flour (00 if possible), water, salt, yeast, olive oil (optional)
🔥 Chef Tip: Cold ferment for 24–72 hours for deeper flavor and better stretch.
🧁 Final Thoughts from the Line
If you’re serious about baking, these five doughs aren’t optional — they’re non-negotiable. Each one trains your hands, your instincts, and your patience. They’ll humble you. But they’ll also make you better.
Master these, and you’ll never look at a tart, éclair, or margherita pizza the same way again.
