Welcome to Bon App\u00e9tit Bake Club<\/strong>, a community of curious bakers. Each month senior Test Kitchen editors Jesse Szewczyk and Shilpa Uskokovic share a must-make recipe and dive deep on why it works. Come bake and learn with us\u2014and don’t forget to join the Bake Club group chat over on Substack.<\/em><\/p>\n Biscuits come in many forms (drop, butterswim, angel) but my favorite kind will forever be flaky, the kind you can peel apart layer by layer, like pages in a paperback book. Such is the approach in our February Bake Club recipe. From afar, this may seem tough to achieve, the sort of magic trick only a pastry chef could accomplish. But that\u2019s not true. You can do it, whoever you are, and you can do it this week, today, even right now.<\/p>\n It\u2019s called folding because that\u2019s what we\u2019ll be doing\u2014folding the dough, like a letter to a lover. This technique is used in other baked goods like croissants or puff pastry or pie crust. The end goal is always the same\u2014to create parallel layers of butter and ensnare them between the dough. Once the dough hits the oven, the butter starts to melt and the water it contains turns to steam, puffing out the surrounding dough like a microscopic balloon.<\/p>\n For croissants and puff pastry, the process is intricate and exacting, involving something called a butter block (which is, well, a big rectangular block of butter) and an expensive machine called a sheeter (whose sole purpose is to smoosh the dough and butter block into increasingly thinner sheets). All that work adds up to a seemingly infinite number of layers. And it\u2019s why most people buy these products at a bakery or supermarket, rather than make them from scratch.<\/p>\n But biscuits aren\u2019t that stringent. An approximation of this action gets the job done more than adequately here. You\u2019ll incorporate butter into flour in haphazard chunks, either with a food processor or your fingers. You\u2019ll shape and fold the dough with a rolling pin, bench scraper, and your hands. And you\u2019ll still get biscuits so lofty and laminated, they\u2019ll make anyone weak in the knees.<\/p>\n I am in favor of folding the dough in thirds like a piece of printer paper. It offers a good balance of building layers quickly, whilst retaining a workable thickness. Folding in half is ineffective and may result in overhandling the dough by the time the layers are built; folding into fourths makes the dough unwieldy. Three is the magic number. Fold and roll the dough at least twice and not more than three times. A dough that\u2019s folded one too many times will become a homogenous blob and yield the opposite of the intended result.<\/p>\n Of course, all of this is spelled out in the recipe for you. So what are you waiting for? Go forth and fold with confidence!<\/p>\n
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