# Touring

Toured dough in the cut.

Touring or soaking is the work of drawing fat in layers into a base dough. The result of the process is a batter .

## Single / double tour

Bakers and pastry chefs speak of single and double tours:

• In a simple tour, the finished sheet of dough is folded twice, so that there are three layers with a total of 9 layers (left in the illustration).
• In the case of a double tour, the baker folds the plate in four layers with a total of 12 layers (on the right in the illustration).

Similar to the production of Damascus steel , this layer composite is subsequently lengthened and folded several times. The direction of pull when rolling out (rolling) is rotated by 90 ° each time, so that the dough is evenly loaded and does not tear.

A puff pastry usually gets two single and two double tours. In the end, it consists of 3 × 3 × 4 × 4 = 144 layers of fat and 288 layers of dough. The inner layers of dough are connected in pairs to form one (see Fig.) - that leaves 145 layers of dough (143 inner double layers plus the two outer layers), one more than fat layers.

The widespread assumption that puff pastry consists of over a thousand layers probably comes from the French name mille feuilles (thousand sheets) for puff pastry. The classic preparation with six simple tours, however, already has 3 6  = 729 layers of fat and thus 730 layers of dough.

The type and amount of tours depends on the dough to fat ratio: the more fat the dough contains, the more tours can be performed.

Example on 1000 g dough:

• 200 g fat = 2 easy tours = 9 fat layers
• 300 g fat = 1 single + 1 double tour = 12 layers of fat
• 900 g fat = 3 single + 1 double tour = 108 layers of fat.

## Calculation formulas

Every simple tour triples the number of previous (fat) layers:

${\ displaystyle x_ {e} = 3 ^ {m} \ cdot x_ {0}}$

With

• the number of layers of fat after completing all easy tours${\ displaystyle x_ {e}}$
• the number of initial layers of fat (usually 1)${\ displaystyle x_ {0}}$
• the number of easy tours,${\ displaystyle m}$

and every double tour quadruples the number of previous (fat) layers:

${\ displaystyle x_ {d} = 4 ^ {n} \ cdot x_ {e}}$

With

• the number of fat layers after performing all double tours${\ displaystyle x_ {d}}$
• the number of double tours.${\ displaystyle n}$

## Individual evidence

1. Sonja Ott-Dörfer (Red.), Bärbel Schermer u. a .: Das Große Buch vom Backen , Teubner, Munich 2012, pp. [84] - [87].