A pastry course covering shortcrust, puff, rough puff, choux, laminated croissant dough and filo. The doughs that underpin most of the patisserie canon.
Choux is a unique dough. It contains no leavening (no yeast, no chemical), yet it rises dramatically in the oven. The rise is entirely steam-driven: water and eggs flash to steam in the hot oven, the dough is elastic enough from the cooked starch and beaten eggs to inflate but not burst, and the result is a hollow puffed shell with a thin crisp crust.
Croissant dough is a special case of laminated pastry. The base dough is a sweet yeasted dough (a brioche-adjacent enrichment with milk, sugar, egg and butter), folded with a butter block, and laminated through three turns. The yeast in the base dough does most of the rising work; the lamination produces the layered crumb that defines the finished pastry.
Filo (phyllo, phylo, yufka, yufak: same dough across the Mediterranean and Middle East) is the thinnest pastry in any tradition. A single sheet, properly stretched, is translucent. Twenty sheets stacked are about 5 mm thick. Baked, they shatter into the most delicate flaky crust.
Pastry sits between bread and cake. Bread is leavened; cake is aerated chemically. Pastry is layered, laminated or rubbed-in to deliver crispness, shortness or flakiness, with butter (or another solid fat) doing most of the structural work. Get the fat-handling right and the dough behaves; get it wrong and the pastry is tough, greasy or collapses.
Puff pastry works on physics, not chemistry. Cold butter is folded into a thin dough, then rolled out and folded again, and again, and again. By the end of the process you have somewhere between 300 and 1500 alternating layers of dough and butter, each only a few microns thick.
Shortcrust gets its name from its texture: short, meaning crumbly and tender rather than chewy or flaky. The shortness comes from butter coating the flour particles so the gluten can never fully develop. The crumbly bite is the result of pockets of fat between layers of flour-and-water; the lack of gluten means the dough sits down rather than shrinking back when rolled.
Sweet short (pate sucree, or pate sablee at its richest) is the dessert cousin of shortcrust. The difference is sugar. Sugar makes the dough behave differently: it browns more deeply, it tenderises further, and it makes the dough more fragile to handle. The pay-off is a finished case with a snap-when-bitten, almost-biscuit texture that holds creams and fruit beautifully.