Why does dough and its ingredients need to be cold?
Recipes keep repeating on how the ingredients you add (at least in pie crust dough) should be cold. A quote:
If your dough gets too warm, send it back into the fridge to chill out. When you take it back out, it should roll more easily.
Why is temperature so important in making a dough more workable?
Best Answer
It's not drastically important in making it workable, it's more important in the texture of the finished result.
When you roll out pastry dough, you are created interleaving layers of fat and the flour/water mix. When you cook it, the fat melts, leaving pockets in the dough, causing it to form flaky layers. This results in a crisp, light pastry.
For this to happen, the fat must remain as solid as possible until cooking. If the fat melts and blends with the flour and water before cooking, you will have a dense, cardboard-like pastry. Also, warm pastry dough tends to become sticky and hard to work with.
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Quick Answer about "Why does dough and its ingredients need to be cold?"
The answer is simple, the warmer dough is, the softer it is (and maybe more sticky). Really fine dough with a lot of fat gets really soft. Cooling it down enables you to work with it easier.Why is it important to keep ingredients cold in pastry?
Pastry must always be chilled in a fridge after making. This helps it to relax which in turn will help to prevent it shrinking on baking. Additionally, instead of trimming excess pastry from a tart case before baking blind you could also leave it overhanging the tin.Why is cold water Important to pastry?
As the fat is mixed with the flour, it is warmed slightly. Then, the water is poured in, and the ice-cold temperature of the water prevents the fat from warming any further, which could potentially melt it into the flour rather than retaining the small bits of fat.Why is it important to keep the dough cold?
Water, however, is absorbed much less easily into flour proteins when the temperature is colder. That's why purists recommend cold ingredients, cold equipment and marble boards. Keeping the butter cold also helps when making short crust pastry because it doesn't melt into the flour when you are working it in.Why does pastry dough have to be cold?
Chilling the ingredients prevents the butter from melting, which would allow the water in the butter to interact with the gluten in the flour, resulting in a less-flaky, more bread-like dough.THE SECRET OF DOUGH RISE FASTER IN JUST A FEW MINUTES
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Answer 2
Its even simpler than what @ElendilTheTall says. He talks about puff pastry, but temperature is general problem. The answer is simple, the warmer dough is, the softer it is (and maybe more sticky). Really fine dough with a lot of fat gets really soft. Cooling it down enables you to work with it easier.
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