Know Your Dough
Guida agli impasti — pasta, pizza, and pastry
Six base doughs cover most of what an Italian kitchen produces: fresh pasta, pizza, brisée, frolla, sfoglia, and choux. Same few ingredients — flour, fat, water, eggs — different ratios, different handling, completely different results.
Almost everything on this blog that starts as a dough starts as one of the six below. Learn what separates them — which ones have yeast, which are built on cold butter, which are cooked twice — and half the recipe pages here become variations on something you already understand.
Three threads run through everything on this page. The flour: semola rimacinata and Tipo 00 are different animals — hard durum semola brings protein, chew, and a golden color, and wants only water; soft 00 wants eggs or fat and gentle handling. The fat: butter builds the northern pastries, but strutto is the southern secret — it laminates the sfogliatella into a hundred crisp layers and turns a plain bread dough into the plush crumb of casatiello. The water: hydration decides destiny, from a pasta cresciuta batter loose enough to drop from a spoon, to a babà dough enriched until its open crumb can drink rum syrup without collapsing.
The six, and where to find them here
Mezza sfoglia — the shortcut worth knowing
Between sfoglia and brisée sits pasta mezza sfoglia — "half puff pastry." Classic sfoglia uses butter and flour in a 1:1 ratio; mezza sfoglia halves the butter (1:2 — say, 200 g butter to 400 g flour). Fewer folds, shorter rests in the fridge, and in the oven it puffs less but keeps an excellent crisp, flaky bite.
It's the ideal base when you want structure without a dramatic rise: torte salate, quiches, tartellette, crostate that need a sturdy flaky shell, and the pâté-style rosticceria pieces of southern street food. Neither sweet nor savory on its own, it takes any filling.
What the chart leaves out — the Neapolitan doughs
The six above are the international canon. A Campanian kitchen adds a few of its own that don't fit neatly in the chart:
Know the dough, and the recipe is half done.
