Dough is a thick, malleable, sometimes elastic paste made from

grain A grain is a small, hard, dry fruit (caryopsis) – with or without an attached hull layer – harvested for human or animal consumption. A grain crop is a grain-producing plant. The two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals and legum ...

s or from leguminous or

chestnut The chestnuts are the deciduous trees and shrubs in the genus ''Castanea'', in the beech family Fagaceae. They are native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The name also refers to the edible nuts they produce. The unrelat ...

crops. Dough is typically made by mixing

flour Flour is a powder made by grinding raw grains, roots, beans, nuts, or seeds. Flours are used to make many different foods. Cereal flour, particularly wheat flour, is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many culture ...

with a small amount of water or other liquid and sometimes includes yeast or other leavening agents, as well as ingredients such as fats or flavorings. Making and shaping dough begins the preparation of a wide variety of foodstuffs, particularly

bread Bread is a staple food prepared from a dough of flour (usually wheat) and water, usually by baking. Throughout recorded history and around the world, it has been an important part of many cultures' diet. It is one of the oldest human-made f ...

s and bread-based items, but also including

biscuit A biscuit is a flour-based baked and shaped food product. In most countries biscuits are typically hard, flat, and unleavened. They are usually sweet and may be made with sugar, chocolate, icing, jam, ginger, or cinnamon. They can also be ...

cake Cake is a flour confection made from flour, sugar, and other ingredients, and is usually baked. In their oldest forms, cakes were modifications of bread, but cakes now cover a wide range of preparations that can be simple or elaborate, ...

cookie A cookie is a baked or cooked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, n ...

dumpling Dumpling is a broad class of dishes that consist of pieces of dough (made from a variety of starch sources), oftentimes wrapped around a filling. The dough can be based on bread, flour, buckwheat or potatoes, and may be filled with meat, fi ...

flatbread A flatbread is a bread made with flour; water, milk, yogurt, or other liquid; and salt, and then thoroughly rolled into flattened dough. Many flatbreads are unleavened, although some are leavened, such as pizza and pita bread. Flatbreads ran ...

s, noodles, pasta, pastry,

pizza Pizza (, ) is a dish of Italian origin consisting of a usually round, flat base of leavened wheat-based dough topped with tomatoes, cheese, and often various other ingredients (such as various types of sausage, anchovies, mushrooms, onions ...

pie A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies may be filled with fruit (as in an apple pie), nuts ( pecan pie), brown sugar ( sugar pie), swe ...

crusts, and similar items. Dough can be made from a wide variety of flour, commonly wheat and

rye Rye (''Secale cereale'') is a grass grown extensively as a grain, a cover crop and a forage crop. It is a member of the wheat tribe (Triticeae) and is closely related to both wheat (''Triticum'') and barley (genus ''Hordeum''). Rye grain is u ...

but also maize, rice,

legumes A legume () is a plant in the family Fabaceae (or Leguminosae), or the fruit or seed of such a plant. When used as a dry grain, the seed is also called a pulse. Legumes are grown agriculturally, primarily for human consumption, for livestock fo ...

almonds The almond (''Prunus amygdalus'', Synonym (taxonomy)#Botany, syn. ''Prunus dulcis'') is a species of tree native to Iran and surrounding countries, including the Levant. The almond is also the name of the edible and widely cultivated seed of th ...

, and other cereals or crops.

Types of dough

Doughs vary widely depending on ingredients, the desired end product, the leavening agent (particularly whether the dough is based on yeast or not), how the dough is mixed (whether quickly mixed or kneaded and left to rise), and cooking or baking technique. There is no formal definition of what makes dough, though most doughs have viscoelastic properties. There are several general classes of dough: *Yeast-Leavened or fermented doughs, made from cereal grains or ground

legume A legume () is a plant in the family Fabaceae (or Leguminosae), or the fruit or seed of such a plant. When used as a dry grain, the seed is also called a pulse. Legumes are grown agriculturally, primarily for human consumption, for livestock f ...

s mixed with water and yeast, are used all over the world to make various types of bread including bread rolls, loaves and

. The addition of salt, oil or other fats,

sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double ...

honey Honey is a sweet and viscous substance made by several bees, the best-known of which are honey bees. Honey is made and stored to nourish bee colonies. Bees produce honey by gathering and then refining the sugary secretions of plants (primar ...

and sometimes milk or eggs will produce bread products of varying texture. Commercial bread dough may also include dough conditioners, which help make the dough and the final product more consistent. *Doughs with higher fat content that contain less water develop less gluten and are therefore generally less elastic than bread doughs. They tend to become tough when they are kneaded These doughs are often called "short" by bakers. Examples include many cookie and

pie dough Shortcrust pastry is a type of pastry often used for the base of a tart, quiche, pie, or (in the British English sense) flan. Shortcrust pastry can be used to make both sweet and savory pies such as apple pie, quiche, lemon meringue or chicke ...

s such as shortcrust pastry. * Quick breads use leavening agents other than yeast (such as baking powder or baking soda), and include most

s, and more. These may be based on a

batter Batter or batters may refer to: Common meanings * Batter (cooking), thin dough that can be easily poured into a pan * Batter (baseball), person whose turn it is to face the pitcher * Batter (cricket), a player who is currently batting * Batter ...

or a dough. Paratha Peda's

* Laminated dough such as mille-feuille and puff pastry where a prepared flour dough is folded over fat (usually butter) and rolled out. The folding and rolling process can be repeated to create very thin layers of dough and butter to create the puff pastry. There are many different techniques to create laminated doughs and some like paratha are relatively simple while others like mille-feuille are more laborious. Most laminated doughs are leavened only by the steam created by the folding process.

Danish pastry A Danish pastry ( da, wienerbrød ) sometimes shortened to just Danish, especially in American English) is a multilayered, laminated sweet pastry in the ''viennoiserie'' tradition. The concept was brought to Denmark by Austrian bakers, where the r ...

and croissant are sometimes considered a separate class of dough because they are made from laminated dough that is leavened with yeast. * Choux pastry is a steam-leavened dough that has a consistency more like thick paste than other doughs. Unlike most other pastry doughs, the ingredients for the dough are cooked ion the stovetop before the dough is baked. Choux means cabbage in French. It's thought that the name comes from the shape of the cream puffs made with choux paste.Alan Davidson. National & Regional Styles of Cookery: Proceedings: Oxford Symposium. 1981. *Some

and pasta doughs are similar enough that experts have difficulty distinguishing them, although dumpling is a very general category that overlaps with others like yeasted breads and batter biscuits. Varying the ratio of liquid and flour in a basic pasta dough may create a softer dough like that used for the German soup noodle spaetzle. Eggs are a very common addition to make the dough moist and easier to roll out. The dough can be filled or shaped various ways and boiled, baked, steamed or fried. *Gluten free doughs like rice noodles and Japanese harusame noodles depend on the gelatinzation of

starch Starch or amylum is a polymeric carbohydrate consisting of numerous glucose units joined by glycosidic bonds. This polysaccharide is produced by most green plants for energy storage. Worldwide, it is the most common carbohydrate in human diets ...

for structure. *Unleavened bread is made not only from wheat but in many cultures has been made from locally available starchy ingredients like corn, oatcakes and casabe de yuca since the earliest times. Sometimes meringue is considered a dough. The English recipe for "Satan Biscuit" dates to 1677, and earlier recipes are known by different names. Some included flour like a 1604 recipe for "white bisket bread".

Techniques

Techniques used in dough production depend on the type of dough and final product. For yeast-based and sponge (such as

sourdough Sourdough or sourdough bread is a bread made by the fermentation of dough using wild lactobacillaceae and yeast. Lactic acid from fermentation imparts a sour taste and improves keeping qualities. History In the ''Encyclopedia of Food Microbio ...

) breads, a common production technique is the dough is mixed, kneaded, and then left to rise. Many bread doughs call for a second stage, where the dough is kneaded again, shaped into the final form, and left to rise a final time (or proofed) before baking. Kneading is the process of working a dough to produce a smooth, elastic dough by developing gluten. This process is both temperature and time-dependent; temperatures that are either too hot or too cold will cause the yeast to not develop, and rising times that are either too short or too long will affect the final product. Pasta is typically made from a dry dough that is kneaded and shaped, either through extrusion, rolling out in a pasta machine, or stretched or shaped by hand (as for gnocchi or dumplings). Pasta may be cooked directly after production (so-called " fresh pasta") or dried, which renders it shelf-stable. Doughs for

s and many flatbreads which are not leavened with yeast are typically mixed but not kneaded or left to rise; these doughs are shaped and cooked directly after mixing. While breads and other products made from doughs are often baked, some types of dough-based foods are cooked over direct heat, such as tortillas, which are cooked directly on a griddle. Fried dough foods are also common in many cultures.

Pancake A pancake (or hotcake, griddlecake, or flapjack) is a flat cake, often thin and round, prepared from a Starch, starch-based batter (cooking), batter that may contain eggs, milk and butter and cooked on a hot surface such as a griddle or fryi ...

s, waffles, some kinds of bar cookies such as brownies, and many

s and quick breads (including muffins and the like) are often made with a semi-liquid

of flour and liquid that is poured into the final shape, rather than a solid dough. Unlike bread dough, these batters are not stabilized by the formation of a gluten network.Stanley P. Cauvain. (2012) Chapter 12: Baking. in ''Food Processing Handbook.'' 2 ed. Wiley. p. 422 . This reference is specifically about cake batter. File:Cirdingis36.gif, Dough being kneaded File:Breaddough1.jpg, Yeast bread dough after kneading, before rising File:Breaddough2.jpg, Yeast bread dough after rising ( proofing), for 40 minutes File:Pasta machine.jpg, Dough being cut into noodles with a pasta machine

References

External links

* * {{Authority control

Types of dough

Techniques

See also

References

Further reading

External links