Dough

Dough is a malleable paste, usually made from flour or meal mixed with water, milk or fat, that forms the base of countless preparations, from bread and cakes to pasta, flatbreads and pastries. It matters because it is the basic way cereals and other starchy foods have been turned into cooked food for thousands of years.

History

Dough has no single date or place of origin, since it comes from a simple technique: mixing ground grain with liquid and cooking it. Sources agree that it has been a staple of diets across much of the world for millennia, spreading alongside the crops of each region.

Wheat flour is the most widely used today, but this has not always been the case everywhere. In the Americas, maize was also used, and other areas worked with oats, rice, beans, soy or even potato flour. Each raw material gave rise to doughs with different textures and methods, from unleavened flatbreads to doughs stretched by hand.

Over time, doughs came to be classified by how they are cooked. Baked doughs give bread, shortcrust and puff pastry, while fried doughs are used for churros, fritters and empanadillas. Doughs cooked on a griddle or in a pan, such as those for tortillas, arepas, roti or chapati, reflect a tradition without an oven. There are also steamed doughs, as for tamales, and boiled ones, as for pasta.

Yeast is common but not essential. Some doughs do without it, such as those for unleavened breads, tortillas, pasta or some dumplings, while others rise thanks to chemical agents like baking powder or baking soda, as in soda bread and scones. In puff pastry, the dough rises from the steam formed when it is folded with butter, and in choux pastry steam from baking makes it rise.

Culture

Dough appears in almost every cuisine in the world, and in many it is tied to home cooking and celebration. Kneading is a skill passed down through generations.

Regional variants are very wide. In Mexico and Central America, maize dough is used for tortillas and tamales; in Venezuela, the dough for hallaquitas or bollitos, wrapped in leaves, is one of the country's traditional preparations. In Spain, fried doughs such as churros and rosquillas are very popular. In the Middle East and the Maghreb, thin filo doughs are used for briks, böreks and pastries.

In Asia and Europe, pasta dough, fresh or dried, holds an important place, and dumplings take different forms in each country. Dough is, in short, a basic technique rather than a single dish, which explains why it remains so present in both home and professional kitchens today.

Trivia