National Pastry Day
Make some baked goods with your favourite pastry on #NationalPastryDay
9 December is National Pastry Day, which is celebrated annually.
Pastry is a name given to a large variety of baked goods typically made up of ingredients such as flour, sugar, milk, butter, shortening, baking powder and eggs.
Some people call the dough made from these ingredients ‘pastry’. Pastry dough is rolled out very thin and then used as the base for different products. A few of the more common pastry items include pies, tarts, quiches and pasties.
Pastries can be traced back as far as the Mediterranean where they produced almost paper thin, multi-layered baklava and filo.
After the Crusaders brought pastry back from the Mediterranean, pastry-making began in Northern Europe.
Puff and choux pastries were eventually perfected by the Italian and French Renaissance chefs and in the 17th and 18th centuries new recipes were brought to the table. Napoleons, cream puffs and eclairs are just some of these new recipes.
The French pastry chef, Antonin Careme (1784 – 1833) is considered by culinary historians to have been the original master of pastry making in the modern era.
There are many different types of pastry and most of them would fall into one of the following categories:
– Soft crust pastry, which is the simplest and most common
– Sweet crust pastry is similar to the soft rust but sweeter
– Flaky pastry is a simple pastry that expands when cooked
– Puff pastry has many layers that cause it to puff when baked
– Choux pastry is a very light pastry that is often filled with cream
– Phyllo pastry is paper-thin pastry that is used in many layers
To celebrate today, try out some recipes and create a pastry masterpiece.
Use #NationalPastryDay to post on social media.
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