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Pastry doughs are foundational to everything from sweet and savory pies to tarts with any number of fillings.

While flour and butter (or another kind of fat) are the base ingredients of pastry, they combine in different forms and techniques to produce unique pastry crusts and shells. Their uses aren’t always interchangeable, and each has a varying degree of difficulty.

To better understand pastry crusts, Pastry & Baking Arts Chef-Instructor Chelsea Burgess explains four common types, defining their applications and providing tips for ensuring successful preparation.

Shortcrust Pastry: Pâte Brisée

When you think of pie crust, shortcrust pastry (aka pâte brisée), is likely the image you conjure.

“It’s your classic pie dough,” says Chef Burgess.

Meaning “broken pastry” in French, “it’s a three-two-one ratio of flour to butter to water,” she says, “where the butter is cut into the flour in small pieces.” It’s the latter that creates the flakiness. 

That’s because the small pieces of butter melt and emit steam during the baking process, coating the flour and, in turn, inhibiting gluten development and creating micro layers within the tender crust.

“Pâte brisée is very versatile,” says Chef Burgess, noting that it can be used in both sweet and savory preparations, from classic fruit pies to quiches. It’s a go-to pastry dough for professional chefs and home cooks alike.

Fortunately, it’s also relatively simple to make, and can be mastered by adhering to a few simple guidelines.

“It's very easy,” says Chef Burgess. “It's just a matter of getting the consistency right, and not over mixing.” These are the two issues she sees most. To avoid this:

• Keep your butter very cold.
• Cut your butter into the flour using a pastry cutter or food processor.
• Keep your water ice cold, and mix it into your dough gradually.
• Rest and chill your dough before rolling.

Other types of shortcrust pastry include pâte sucrée, (meaning “sugared pastry”) a dough sweetened with powdered sugar and enriched with egg, and pâte sablée, (meaning “sandy pastry”) which has a higher proportion of butter for a crumbly, cookie-like consistency.

Try it at home: Fresh Fruit Tart

Puff Pastry

Puff pastry relies upon the same ingredients as pâte brisée. However, it has a much higher degree of difficulty, and a vastly different outcome.

“Puff pastry is a laminated dough, which means that you take a sheet of dough and a sheet of butter, and you essentially fold and roll them together,” says Chef Burgess, “which creates layers of dough, butter, dough, butter, dough, butter … so when those go into the oven and create steam, it separates those layers and makes it so flaky.”

(On a personal note, the fact that butter could itself be rolled out just like dough was a revelation in my culinary school experience.)

Like pâte brisée, puff pastry can also be used in many different ways. “It's a neutral dough, so it can be used for lots of different applications, both sweet or savory,” explains Chef Burgess.

Classic mille feuille, cheese sticks, filled turnovers, and palmiers can all be made with puff pastry, and it is often used as a top crust for pot pies and other casseroles.

Unlike pâte brisée, puff pastry isn’t designed to be the bottom layer of a filled pie. While it can support some toppings as the basis for a light tart, it lacks the heft and density to withstand weightier fillings.  

“It would be a waste of your effort,” says Chef Burgess, “to cover [puff pastry] with something heavy once you’ve got all those layers.”

Technically speaking, “puff pastry does require a little bit more precision and getting the temperature right,” says Chef Burgess.

“You need the butter to stay cold, but not too cold, and there are lots of what we call turns involved,” she says, referring to the process of continually folding, rolling, resting, and turning the butter and flour “package” to achieve all the requisite laters. “So it does take a little bit more finesse.”

Try it at home: 2 Puff Pastry Recipes

Pâte à Choux or Choux Dough

Choux dough is used for shells of what are sometimes called cream puffs. It is not, however, the same as puff pastry. Rather, it’s an enriched dough that typically contains eggs.

“Choux dough gets cooked twice, once on the stove, and once in the oven,” says Chef Burgess.

“You're cooking the flour with the water or milk and butter on the stove, creating a thick paste. Then you're putting it in the mixer, and you're adding in eggs until you get the right consistency,” she explains.

The thick dough is then piped and baked, where the protein and moisture content result in an airy structure, creating light pastries like churros and beignets and shells for recipes including cream puffs, eclairs, and Paris-Brest, among others.

While the most well-known preparations of choux dough are sweet, it’s still versatile like both pâte brisée and puff pastry.

“Again, it's a neutral dough, so it can be used for sweet or savory,” says Chef Burgess, with savory preparations including gougères, gnocchi Parisienne, or pommes dauphine.

There’s a degree of technicality to choux dough that can make it more complicated. For example, the amount of moisture needed, both as water and egg content, varies by pastry. Balancing ingredients and identifying the moisture tipping point is the challenge.  

“It's about that ideal consistency,” says Chef Burgess. “It's not always going to be the exact same amount of water, depending on your environment. Then, depending on how far you cook it on the stove and how dry the paste becomes, determines how much more egg you need to add into it,” she says.

“So sometimes you might need more, sometimes you might need less. It's really about just recognizing the right consistency,” which is a skill that may need to be honed over time.

Try it at home: Croquembouche 

Filo or Phyllo

No matter how you spell it, filo or phyllo dough is a versatile — but very technically challenging — crust. It is similar in structure to puff pastry in that it consists of multiple layers of flour and fat.

“Filo dough is stretched paper thin,” explains Chef Burgess, “and then you're sort of putting liquid fat in between the dough layers, and stacking them individually, instead of the folding and rolling out process of lamination.”

Its extremely thin layers result in a highly textured crust. “Filo is very, very crispy, even more crunchy than I would say puff pastry is,” says Burgess.

For Chef Buress, phyllo dough brings baklava — whose dough remains crunchy despite being soaked in honey syrup — to mind. Greek and Mediterranean pastries both sweet and savory utilize filo. Spanakopita, for example, is a spinach and cheese pie built with filo.

Because of its degree of difficulty, “filo is rarely made in house,” says Burgess.

“That’s a whole separate skill set that is quite challenging,” she says, adding that it's absolutely okay — and perhaps advisable — to purchase store-bought phyllo “and then assemble it yourself.”

Try it at home: Filo Roll with Swiss Chard and Ricotta