Dough

Dough is a soft, flexible paste made from flour and a little water or another liquid. Flour comes from grains or crops like legumes and chestnuts. When you mix flour with water, sometimes with yeast or other ingredients to make it rise, you get dough.

Dough is the first step in making many foods, especially breads. It is also used to make biscuits, cakes, cookies, dumplings, flatbreads, noodles, pasta, pastry, pizza, piecrusts, and scones. People use many kinds of flour to make dough, such as wheat, rye, maize, rice, legumes, and almonds.

Types of dough

Dough is a soft, bendable mixture used to make many foods. Most doughs can stretch and squish.

Yeast is used to make different kinds of bread, like bread rolls, regular loaves, and some flatbread. Not all yeast doughs need to be worked by hand. Some doughs, like ciabatta and focaccia, can be folded instead. Commercial bread dough might have special mixes called dough conditioners to keep it consistent.

Adding milk, salt, fats, eggs, sugar, or other ingredients changes the texture of the bread. Enriched doughs include Viennoiserie and holiday breads like brioche, such as babka, panettone, and king cake. Quick breads use things like baking powder or baking soda instead of yeast, and include soda bread, scones, and biscuits.

Unleavened bread can be made from many grains, not just wheat. People have used local grains like corn, oats, and cassava to make bread for a very long time.

Laminated dough, like mille-feuille and puff pastry, is folded with fat to create layers. Some laminated doughs, like paratha, are simple, while others, like mille-feuille, take more work. Most of these doughs rise because of steam, but croissants use yeast.

Choux pastry is a special dough cooked on the stove before baking. It is used for sweet treats like cream puffs, eclairs, homemade funnel cakes, tulumba, and churros. The name "choux" means "cabbage" in French and might come from the shape of the cream puffs.

Gluten helps give dough its shape and texture. Gluten-free doughs, like rice noodles and Japanese harusame noodles, rely on starch for structure.

Doughs with more fat are usually less stretchy and can become tough when worked. These are often called "short" doughs and include many cookie and pie doughs like shortcrust pastry.

Some dumpling and pasta doughs are very similar. Changing the amount of liquid and flour in pasta dough can make it softer, like in German spaetzle noodles. Eggs are often added to make the dough easier to roll out. The dough can be filled, shaped, and cooked in many ways.

Sometimes meringue is thought of as a dough. Old recipes from as early as 1677 mention something called "Satin Biscuit," and even older recipes exist with different names. Some of these old recipes included flour.

Techniques

Making dough depends on what you want to create. For breads that use yeast, like sourdough, the dough is mixed, worked, and left to rise. Often, it is worked again, shaped, and left to rise once more before baking. Working the dough helps it become smooth and stretchy by forming gluten. The temperature and time matter for this process.

Pasta is usually made from a dry dough that is shaped by machines, rolling, or by hand, like for gnocchi or dumplings. It can be cooked right away or dried to keep longer.

For biscuits and many flatbreads that don’t use yeast, the dough is mixed but not worked or left to rise. It is shaped and cooked right after mixing.

While many dough foods are baked, some are cooked directly on a griddle, like tortillas. Fried dough foods are popular in many places.

Pancakes, waffles, some bar cookies like brownies, and many cakes and quick breads, such as muffins, are made with a liquid mix of flour and other liquids. Unlike bread dough, these mixes don’t form a stretchy network.

Dough being [kneaded](/wiki/Kneading)



Yeast bread dough after kneading, before rising



Yeast bread dough after rising ([proofing](/wiki/Proofing_\(baking_technique\))), for 40 minutes



Dough being cut into noodles with a pasta machine