Fold egg foams

Hey, you guys.

You know that technique where you kinda

Gently fold ingredients together rather than just stirring them? you know, that technique i've recommended to you probably dozens of times by now? i'm really sorry to say, but i think it might be bull&^$%.

I mean, in my defense, it's not like I invented folding. Folding is the conventional wisdom. It's taught in culinary schools every day. It's a core technique of classic French cuisine. But, according some experiments I've been doing, gentle folding really might be pointless. You can just beat your egg white foam or your whipped cream or whatever directly with the other ingredients and your thing will come out basically the same, arguably better than if was folded. I'm going to show you some of the experiments I've been doing of late that have led me to this conclusion.

Maybe I'll convince you that folding is pointless, maybe I won't, but at the very least I'll show you three pretty good little dessert recipes, starting with angel food cake, one of the simplest sponge cakes. Angel food cake is extremely sticky, so you normally have to line every side of the pan painstakingly with perfectly measured strips of parchment paper. I don't have time for that right now so I'm doing the crumple trick. I'll crack five eggs into a big bowl and fish out the yolks. Maybe half a teaspoon of cream of tartar to stabilize the foam. Drop in the beaters and whip to stiff-ish peaks. Then I'll beat in 3/4 of a cup of sugar, 175g, until I've got a pretty stiff meringue. A little pinch of salt for flavor, a little splash of vanilla, mix that in, done.

Last ingredient is half a cup, 60g of flour — cake flour if you have it. The conventional wisdom is, you have to cut and fold, scrape down the bowl and fold, cut and fold. The flour granules are not compatible with the foam. I'm not sure what the mechanism is, but the flour does somehow disrupt the bubbles and it'll deflate your foam if you overwork this, if you mix it too much. The folding procedure is supposed to be more gentle, helping you integrate the flour while popping as few bubbles as possible. Looks homogenous enough. Time to pour that into the loaf pan. You can only bake angel food in narrow pans — loafs, tubes.

If the area of the cake is too wide it'll collapse in the middle. Hey, you remember the '90s when people considered angel food cake to be a diet dessert because it has no fat? Solid logic. Anyway, I'ma do this again, same ingredients, same procedure except for the the final mixing. Am I painstakingly weighing out each ingredient to make sure the two sample cakes are identical, save for the one variable of the folding? No. Let me tell you about my favorite legal Latin figure of speech — de minimis. It means, in effect, too small to be worth worrying about. So for example, like, driving a teeny tiny fraction over the speed limit is technically illegal, but it's too trivial for the court to bother itself with. If these two cakes come out so similar that I can't tell which factor is responsible for their minor differences, then that factor is de minimis — it's not worthy of consideration in the context of home cooking.

This ain't rocket science — it's cake. Ok, time to integrate the flour, and I'm just gonna beat it in with the electric mixer, no folding. I'm gonna be careful to not overdo it.

I've gotta stop and scrape the sides down.

Even then, this is still easier than folding. 25 seconds total and that is homogenous. Into the cake pan. Volume seems about the same.

Bake for about an hour at 350ºF/180ºC. Folded angel food cake batter is on the right. Place your bets now if you think one of the cakes is gonna come out fluffier than the other. Have a little peak and those look exactly the same in terms of volume. On the outside at least, they both seem as sturdy and cushy as my mattress from Helix Sleep, the sponsor of this video. I'll throw a raw egg onto this mattress no problem. My Helix is as stable as foams get. Actually, this.

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I pierced the folded one to test for doneness. Let's look inside. This is the batter we beat mercilessly instead of folding. There's a big bubble in there, but that could be a coincidence. Here's the folded cake.

No big bubbles yet.

Let's cut a little further into both

— and yeah, come on, these are the same.

They taste the same, they feel the same.

Any differences are de minimis. "Mmm, I love cake.". Indeed, buddy. And because angel food has no fat, it kinda tastes like the lovechild of cake and cotton candy. I highly recommend it if you've never tried it. But let's test folding on something that does have fat. Fat is generally quite destabilizing for egg foams, as we have discussed previously. Maybe folding will actually improve a batter that's a bit richer? We'll do a soufflé.

2 oz, 60g of butter in a saucepan over gentle heat. And let's make it chocolate, for color contrast. A quarter-pound dark chocolate bar, 113g. Whisk until just melted. Grab three eggs and fish out the yolks. Drop them in the chocolate along with a pinch of salt and a splash of vanilla. Whisk smooth. A little cream of tartar with the whites, beat until stiff peaks, then beat in three tablespoons of sugar, about 40g.

Now, soufflés are notoriously fussy and sensitive to minor details, so sure, this time I'll weigh everything out. I weighed the empty bowl earlier, so subtract that from my new weight and that's how many grams of meringue we've got. Here's how much of the chocolate base we have. Into a fresh bowl I'll put half our weight of meringue, half our weight of chocolate. Repeat that with the other half of meringue, and now it's time to fold. I think I let my chocolate cool a little too much — I'm having trouble getting it integrated. But people usually say a soufflé doesn't have to be totally homogenous. It mostly just needs to be fluffy, and I can see I'm deflating this a bit so I'll stop in a sec.

Mixing a viscous liquid with a foam absolutely does deflate the foam — that much is not a myth. Into a buttered ramekin with that. Now this one, I'm just gonna blast with the beaters. In 15 seconds it's as homogenous as the other batter. I'm still being careful to not overdo it. Into the ramekin will you. I'll do the trick where you carve a little out of the edge of the batter — this keeps the soufflé from getting an unstable muffin-top in the oven. I could have been cleaner with that, but fine.

Folded soufflé batter is on the right.

Bake at 400ºF/200ºC for 15 or 20

Minutes until it's exploding out of the ramekin, and if anything, the batter we just blasted with the beaters is better.

I mean, I tried to not beat the batter any smoother than the one I folded, but I did a little bit, so the top is smoother and they both got the same amount of lift in the oven. Folding did nothing to preserve the bubbles. Now, some very schooled pastry chef is probably already halfway though a comment, saying, "This was an unfair test — you didn't do the folding correctly." And maybe I didn't. But if you have to be a schooled pastry chef in order to fold soufflé batter in such a way that it beats simply beating it with the beaters, then again — I think the difference is de minimis. Home cooks aren't gonna do it perfectly, so we might as well go with the easier option and folding ain't it. Of course, there are other kinds of delicate foams that we deal with in the kitchen, not just meringue.

Not just whipped egg whites. How about whipped cream? Let's do an experiment with that. We'll need something else more viscous to fold into our whipped cream, so four of the egg yolks leftover from our angel food cake, a tablespoon of flour, like 10g, and a quarter cup cornstarch, 30g. A pinch of salt. 3/4 cup sugar, 150g. We're gonna need more liquid before we can mix this smooth. A splash of vanilla, and I'll start drizzling in 3 cups of milk, 700 mL. Just a little at first — it's easier to whisk lumps out of a paste when it's really thick.

Now I can get it all in, turn on the heat and bring this to a boil. Classically, you'd just heat the milk and use it to gently temper the eggs. Tempering is not bull&^$%, because people generally acknowledge it's not necessary. It just reduces the risk that you might curdle the eggs. But if you whisk constantly and scrape down the sides and bottom of the pan, you can totally do this with everything mixed together at once over direct heat, no tempering. As it approaches the boil, first the egg proteins coagulate and then the cornstarch will gelatinize, followed by the wheat starch, and I love how it's like somebody flipped a light switch. Suddenly we have a luscious pastry cream. Turn the heat off and then melt in 2 oz, 60g of butter.

We need to cool this all the way down and I don't have time to just let that happen naturally, so — big bowl with ice, a few handfuls of salt and cold water. The salt lowers the freezing point of the ice, so we end up with super-chilled liquid water just wrapping itself around the custard bowl, and if I just stir constantly this should be cool in minutes. I've just gotta stop before it starts freezing into starchy ice cream. Holy crap that is the best pudding you've had in your life. Time to whip up a pint of cream, just under 500mL. Hey, does it really have to be cold? Well, I've tested this one before. Cold cream does whip up faster, but it doesn't whip up any better. Back in the day when you were doing this by hand, anything that you could do to save a few strokes was worth doing, but it doesn't really matter these days.

So that's where the "your cream has to be cold" rule comes from. But it's pretty much irrelevant now if you have a power tool. Ok, that looks good.

Now we're gonna combine the whipped cream

And the pastry cream — equal parts by volume.

A cup of each into a bowl

— i'll measure as precisely as i can.

Now I'll do what convention dictates and gently fold these two together until I don't see any streaks of white left. Equal parts cremé patissiere and whipped cream mixed together by volume equals = cremé diplomat. What a name.

If you taste it expecting to get mayonnaise you are in for a delightful shock. This is a test of volume, so let's scrape this out and measure it by volume. Looks like we're just shy of 450 mL. Ok, grab another cup of whipped cream and a cup of pastry cream. The ratio doesn't need to be perfect to taste good, I'm just trying to standardize the experiment. And instead of gently folding I'm gonna beat this mercilessly until homogenous. Took about 20 seconds. Let's measure its total volume.

People traditionally dip berries in cremé diplomat but I swear I would eat just a whole bowl of it. No wait, I've gotta measure before I eat it. And even minus that taste, yeah, it still looks like just shy of 450 mL. Any difference is de minimis. So yeah, I think folding might be bull&^$%. You don't have to fold your foam gently with other ingredients. You can just mix them really hard the normal way, as long as you stop once they become homogenous. Lisa, who sent me this email: Yeah, I think you're right and.

I was wrong. It takes are certain amount of agitation to homogenize a mixture, and it doesn't seem to matter whether that agitation comes from folding or normal mixing. Now please, if you see somebody on the internet gently folding their ingredients, do not tell them, Oh, Adam says you're stupid.". This rule had to come from somewhere. There may be some situations where folding really is advantageous — I just have yet to identify what those are. Maybe you'll tell me. In the meantime, I've got all these delicious foams now, so it's time for some foam-on-foam action. Pretty nice, but how about some hot foam on foam action? That's out of control good. Recipes are in the description, as usual. However you mix your foams, give that combination there a try...