Welcome to Bon Appétit Bake Club, 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—and don’t forget to join the Bake Club group chat over on Substack.
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’s not true. You can do it, whoever you are, and you can do it this week, today, even right now.
It’s called folding because that’s what we’ll be doing—folding 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—to 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.
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’s why most people buy these products at a bakery or supermarket, rather than make them from scratch.
But biscuits aren’t that stringent. An approximation of this action gets the job done more than adequately here. You’ll incorporate butter into flour in haphazard chunks, either with a food processor or your fingers. You’ll shape and fold the dough with a rolling pin, bench scraper, and your hands. And you’ll still get biscuits so lofty and laminated, they’ll make anyone weak in the knees.
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’s folded one too many times will become a homogenous blob and yield the opposite of the intended result.
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!
