Field notes / 015

To Fold or Not to Fold

What do you mean, “fold in the flour”? How do I do that?

What does folding mean?

Some recipes rely on incorporating air into the batter prior to baking rather than leaveners like baking powder in order to achieve a light, delicate texture in the final product.

When would I fold ingredients?

One recipe example that calls for folding is macarons. Others include angel food cake, souffles, or mousse.

You might also see instructions to fold in mix-ins at the end of a muffin recipe, but that’s less about deflating the batter, and more about preventing over-mixing and being gentle on fresh fruit.

How is folding done?

In the macaron example, egg whites are beaten to a meringue before the dry ingredients are added. But, simply beating in the almond flour as if it were chocolate chip cookie dough would completely deflate the air from the meringue. Instead, we fold the almond flour in.

I know, I know, at this point, you’re thinking “BUT HOW???” Yes, we’re all thinking about the Schitt’s Creek scene.

I’m getting there, I promise.

The key to the technique is to fold enough so that the dry ingredients are incorporated, but to do it as quickly as possible so that you don’t lose much air (and end up with a flat final product), or create too many gluten strands (and end up with a tough, rather than delicate, final product).

So, let’s say you’re making those macarons. You’ve got your bowl of beaten egg whites, a separate bowl with your dry ingredients, and a silicone spatula. Macarons typically have you fold in about a third of the dry ingredients at a time, because pouring all the almond on top of the egg whites at once would deflate the air.

So, you gently sprinkle some of the almond flour mixture on top. You take your spatula, cut through the middle of your batter, getting down to the bottom of the bowl. Sweep along the bottom of the bowl and up the side. Then, lift the mixture from the bottom and gently bring it up and flip it over on top of the rest of the batter.

Rotate the bowl approximately a quarter turn, and repeat the motion, rotating the bowl as you go, until the ingredients are mostly incorporated, add another third of the ingredients, continue folding until almost fully incorporated, and repeat with the remaining third until fully incorporated. Your arm is going to get a workout.

In your kitchen

1. Practice. Make lots of test batches before you volunteer to bake macarons for your sister’s wedding shower.
2. Practice some more. It’s a good skill to have in your baking apron.
3. There’s more than one technique called folding. If you see the term in a bread recipe, that’s a different type of folding.

Folding is a mixing technique to add dry ingredients without deflating the batter.

Stay curious, Coleen x