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Adam, I recently made homemade lemonade with Oleo-Saccharum. It was my first time doing it and I was amazed! Can you break down the science behind this? Are there other fruits where I can get a similar results other than citrus?
I think part of why folding is recommended is because overmixing definitely IS a concern for a lot of these recipes, and folding simply makes it harder to overmix, or at least keeps the overmixing to a minimum. A couple of extra folds probably isn’t going to ruin your dessert, but a couple of extra seconds of full-speed egg beater action might.
I think this is a particularly compelling reason for newer bakers to stick to folding, whereas an experienced home cook like Adam or a professional is likely to have a better sense of when to stop.
@@muhammadmousa4192 makes sense, but you'd have to think this rule evolved before modern mixers. it's much harder to manually over beat your batter unless you're like punching it. that adds another layer
One thing Adam didn’t do is try manually beating the mixtures for his non-fold test versions instead of using the electric mixer. It therefore may be possible that it is this method which knocks out a problematic amount of air before all the ingredients are fully incorporated into a homogenous mixture. And if that’s the case, it would make perfect since why folding was advised as an alternative, since that was the _only_ way you could beat something together until relatively recently.
@@muhammadmousa4192 There’s an easy fix to that, which I know Chef John has used for other batters that are important not to overmix- instruct people to stop _just before_ everything is fully combined. A common way to describe that would be for example “mix until there are only a couple small streaks visible”. With this advice, one of two things are likely to happen: First, they do exactly that, in which case it is almost certain that those streaks will disappear in the process of the substance being transferred wherever it needs to go. And even if 0.01% is left not entirely incorporated… who cares? It’s very unlikely to matter. Or second, they mix just a bit “too much”… but because of how you instructed them, that only means they mixed it just to the point of being 100% combined, which is perfect anyway! This is essentially the same thing as how meetings often start in actuality 5-10 minutes later than people are told they will beforehand. There’s a certain irreducible number who will always be a bit late, so you just simply have to shift back their frame of reference for “on time” to account for that. Meanwhile the people who are punctual just have to do a bit of waiting and idle chat, which is vastly preferable to others missing the start of the meeting.
Ive watched some videos of a Japanese pastry chefs doing those Japanese jiggly desserts and she would always say folding is not necessary she would always remind her viewers how shes a professional baker and knows what shes doing cus someone would always attack her about it.
The pastry chef of the Culinary institute I went to always maintained this idea. He taught us to just use a whisk slowly and stop once it looks combined. Never folding anything ever again.
VERY underrated comment; this should be the top one. As many here have been pointing out, contrary to Adam's hypothetical snooty pastry instructor, the real benefit of the "fold" seems to be to the *less* experienced cook, because of the control it gives you when the stakes are high and the margin of error demands respect. Straight from the *actual* professor's mouth, then, the whisk is the clear answer, with every advantage and no drawback. It's as fast and unfussy as you need to be in practice (in fact *especially* for the smaller batches of the home cook), yet it gives you the control to be aware of your progress and stop before it's too late.
Alternately: I fold pancake batter, because I really value that exceptionally tender gluten-barely-there texture. Maybe I’m just counteracting an instinct to overmix…
This is what I do. I use almost a folding motion with a whisk, yes, but everything gets incorporated with many fewer strokes and it's still easier to control over-mixing. I have a hand and stand mixer but almost everything that doesn't have a softened butter base, I just mix by hand.
I'm far from a professional, or even super experienced (I'm what you call super broke so I can't bake often, though I've been baking on my own since I was allowed to use an oven and from scratch since I was like 14 or 15 so I have at least a smidge of exp. haha) Anywho, back on topic, the only time I really fold is when something is too thin for me to want to use the hand mixer on even low. But I'm lazy and hate cleaning. lol Or when I'm really new to a specific recipe and that's to slow things down so I can learn more about the stages of it's mixing.
When I used to make a sponge cake almost every week, I tried 'not folding', but I found it hard to avoid over-mixing (I can be absent-minded at times), so I went back to folding. But when I didn't space out, I couldn't tell the difference either.
Yeah, not sure if it counts as over-mixing, but sponge cakes that re-incorporate the egg yolk end up with noticably larger bubbles and voids when mixed with the egg beater. Which I guess makes sense because then you're whipping air into a thicker batter. Usually people want it to be much finer, so folding is the way to go there.
This channel is truly the spiritual successor to good eats. Using science and experiments to give home cooks practical and scientific knowledge about our cooking.
And I love this De Minimus concept. Kenji Lopez-Alt also has talked about this. We've gotten really good at trying to extract an extra 1% for 'perfect' foods and now we're stepping back to figure out which of these techniques really make a notable impact.
Honestly it's a better successor, Good Eats leans a bit too far away from the practical for my tastes. Too many fancy kitchen gadgets, when you have about 8 square feet of counterspace (that's taking into account permanent appliances like the microwave and toaster and things like the dish drainer) like I do, you want to own as few tools as necessary to get the jobs done, and do as many things with hand tools and a couple of bowls as can be done. We've got a stand mixer, but the only place we have room for it is on an extra table in the dining room, we used to have it in the kitchen, but we decided that the counterspace was better served with a microwave (something we use on a daily basis, rather than something we use on a monthly or yearly basis).
As a “very schooled (cuisine and) pastry chef” I can say… I absolutely love your content! I learned a lot of myths in culinarily school and in the restaurants I work in. You learn more technique, speed and efficiency as a chef. You can learn more theory and variety as a home cook. It takes time to question these things and test side by side and most chefs don’t have a free minute. Thanks for your content Adam!
My guess is that folding is a technique that was preached to "idiot-proof" some parts of recipes since there's always gonna be someone to ruin things. I remember in highschool chemistry class doing titrations where you're supposed to drip solutions drop by drop and there was always someone who full sent it
Also Adam has experience on his side here. His meringue mixing is just moments from deflating. Meanwhile you can fold for far longer than is necessary without meaningfully harming the foam. Further, I find it odd that he didn’t test the stability of a cold meringue mixing preparation. Heavy cream isn’t a particularly fragile foam, but egg whites are and sure if you bake off a cake or soufflé very quickly then stability doesn’t matter as much since moisture evaporated the batter sets on the airy scaffold. But in a cold preparation stability matters and whisks are molecular wrecking balls in a way that spatulas aren’t so disruption to the protein matrix aren’t trivial in those scenarios.
In their defence titrations are in my opinion one of the most boring parts of chemistry (coming from me who is currently actively studying it and like the subject a lot)
@@g33xzi11a He's also using very small portions. Of course if you're doing an experiment it's going to be harder to tell the difference when the samples are tiny. He should have made full angelfood cakes and full soufflés.
As someone who really likes chemistry, this is a pretty apt comparison. Since I always had a good idea of exactly how much base I needed to finish a titration I could full send it and then stop the titration right when the equilibrium point was reached. But of course it definitely wasn’t the safe way to do it lolol
the point of this experiment in my opinion is to show that these dishes that typically seem intimidating actually have a much wider margin of error than a novice home cook might make them out to be, although I do understand that the experiment in this video could have been carried out better.
I always thought the folding thing was a way to ensure novice cooks wouldn't destroy what used to be a lot of hard work beating eggs into stiff peaks by accidentally undoing it, so they were told to fold it to be safe. I always just use gentle stirring or very small bursts of the mixer on low. That way it gets well mixed fast without damaging the eggs.
Yes I would also guess. If you use the mixer it is very easy to overdo it. And if I write both alternatives into the recipe. Mix on highes power level until the ingredients are combined.. Or mix it gently until the ingredients are combined. I am sure which one will fail more often :D
I’d reckon that if you’re a person with a nice attention to detail and a decent reaction time… like, say, you’re good at fast-paced video games… then the brief blast with high speed may be ideal for you. As long as I know what level of combination I’m shooting for, what it actually looks like, the thought that I’d keep the mixer on for even an entire second too long seems like an unlikely outcome. Especially since I know, for such a brief action that requires some level of precision, it will have my undivided attention. On the other hand, if you’re someone who has never picked up an action/platform/fighting video game in your life, and who generally tries to hug the speed limit on the road out of an abundance of caution related to how quickly you react to things… yeah, probably not a good idea. And there’s no shame in that whatsoever! This isn’t a “hehheh git gud scrubs” thing, everyone’s a bit different out there. What works for one won’t work for another.
As I understood it it's from classical technique, before power tools, folding with a (thin) metal spoon was to differentiate from just stirring the mix together
I feel like sometimes people are too shy or proud to state the real, maybe softer reason why they do things the way they do, so then they try to justify them with shoddy hard logic. I also fold foams when I have time, cuz it makes me feel like a pastry chef lmao. Even talk to myself like I'm in a bake off.
I like to fold because there's some tests I can do as an amateur pastry chef to see if it's ready that I can't do with a beater. E.g. the ribbon figure-8 when testing macaron batter consistency
@@jbarz I love this comment, as if you have to explain or justify why you like doing things the way you do. Once had a fight with my ex over how I was doing the dishes.. although slower, the way I did it was just more satisfying for me.
Did the same once for Adam's macaron recipe when I felt a bit lazy and they turned out better than any of the ones I made before. Haven't folded since.
I own a company that makes hundreds of thousands of macarons per year.... thousands per day. We don't fold. The only consideration is making sure you get a homogenous mixture by scraping down the sides of the mixer at intervals.
My husband's grandma still considers angel food cake to be a diet dessert. We did a low carb diet a couple years back and we told her ahead of time that we didn't want her to make any dessert when we came to visit because we were doing a low carb diet. She made an angel food cake for dessert and said she made it special for us since we were on a diet.
To be fair, im sure in a decade the whole anti-carb bandwagon will dispel and give way to a different diet fad. I mean according to the low-carb diet, you can eat as many cheeseburgers (minus the bun) as you want and its perfectly healthy!
@@UBvtuber carbs are the main thing you can cut nowadays to lose weight + theyre directly linked to diabetes, fats on the other hand have a way harder time getting at you unless you chug unsaturated fats like you dont wanna live lol
I do wonder how much of a difference folding would make compared to whisking by hand, because the technique obviously predates electric tools. Perhaps the process of mixing with an electric tool itself generates air bubbles that go some way to equalising what you're losing?
Modern hand whisks haven't been around forever either. Before the 19th century all you had was a bunch of twigs, like Townsends uses, or perhaps finely split bamboo if you were in Asia.
I think thet just noticed that overmixing is a thing and that mixing reduced the foam and then tried to do it as gently as possible. For a few select deserts maybe some didn't go for a homogenous mix so it appears even fluffyer, and then folding would give you more control. (I certainly underfolded many deserts as i was overcareful so i can relate haha)
Nope. I have been unceremoniously stirring in the foam with a spoon for the longest time. I'm impatient and I used to break all the cooking rules to see if the results will be bad enough to justify the fuff. And the answer was very often 'no'. I never melt chocolate over a double boiler or sieve my flower or do any other traditional things.
@@AnHeC Sieving flour is a tradition born out of old times, when there were impurities in flour. In modern times, every bag of flour i've opened, and i've opened literally hundreds was pristine. There's no truth to better "aeration" with sieving the flour. It's all mixed and dispersed in batter, so if there's any miniscule air that was trapped between grains of flour will probably make no difference when incorporated into batter.
As a trained pastry chef, my take on folding vs. whisking with an electric mixer was always that the mixer will do it better in less time, in most cases. There is a point to be made about lower-end mixers that don't have thin whisk attachments like yours does, because those mixers will absolutely wreck any egg foam in seconds. My only criticism about the video is about tempering eggs: it's not done so much for protecting the eggs from curdling. Tempering is a technique that's extremely important in a professional kitchen, and especially important when making a big batch of a cream with cooked eggs. Tempering the egg yolks makes the process more time efficient because it actually allows you to boil the milk relatively unattended while you take care of something else, while adding the eggs from the start makes you have to whisk the mixture for the entire time, which is both inefficient and tiresome.
this is an argument for tempering being unneccessary in a home kitchen...since we are not a professional kitchen attempting to maximize our time efficiency. as Adam said, de minimus
I'll generally only fold in berries, chocolate chips, and other last-ingredients with a tendency to run. I only do this for presentation purposes when serving people who wouldn't want purple pancakes or whatever. Also, Creme Diplomat is the best cake frosting in the world. There's a really fast way to make it with instant pudding mix and it's amazing on any kind of cake.
I think that either things like berries, or just getting an excuse to not over-exert under the eyes of blowhards (or to prevent blow-hards from over-exerting...), are probably the secret of it- the rule probably was formulated for a situation that was actually appropriate to it, and some time after that came to be drastically over-applied by people that didn't actually understand the reason for it, who then passed down their misunderstanding instead of the facts behind it. Thus we fold when we shouldn't.
Personally I prefer my blueberry muffins with broken blueberries rather than whole intact ones, found this out after I carefully folded em in one time lol
I found folding to be neccesary when making the modern Russian "variant" of Charlotte cake (Шарлотка), i.e. sponge-cake with yolks and apples. So at first I was actually using the mixer to add flour into the whipped eggs (containing both yolks&whites), but I wasn't getting the fluff-level I was hoping for. Because the mix was kinda getting clumpy, I was forced to mix longer than you'd want just to get it clump free; and I simply refuse to use baking soda to "fix it". But when I found the folding technique and tried it out, it made a huge difference. With this recipe it's important to not open the oven too soon (like when you want to check for readiness), otherwise you'll lose a lot of fluff and diminish any gains from the folding.
I can tell you as a native to this recipe, that I never fold it. My mother had always been using her old soviet mixer, and same true for my mother's mother (well, as far as I can remember, her kitchen gadget was older than me, apparently).Me? I sometimes may go even as far as beating the eggs w\o separation, and it works too. Could be something with the recipe itself? In my family it's 3 eggs + 1 glass of white flour + 1 glass of sugar (can be less, if the apples are sweet). Everything had been always been measured with a soviet drinking glass (or "stakan"), which is approximately 250ml. Amount of apples depends on their size, juciness and sweetness.
@@nrieh4553 Yeah, most recipes just suggest using a mixer, and so did my mom. If I use a mixer it doesn't turn into a complete failure, it still tastes nice. It's just not as fluffy as it could have been. Now I do have a few deviations that might make a difference: I refuse to use any salt or bakingsoda no matter what the recipe says; and I usually use less sugar than a recipe suggests. Russian flour usually has a higher protein content than the flour that's sold where I live (in the netherlands). Antonovka apples are quite high in pectin content, significantly higher than. The sugar and eggs should be the same.
@@nrieh4553 ahahahah omg my mom still has a mixer that is older than me and I was born in the 80s :))) I remember making lots of charlotkas with it when I was in high school. Yeah we used the same proportions.
@@nrieh4553 This is the same recipe I have for this as well. I use my mixer too. I am in the the US, for flour and sugar differences. It's really about "how does it feel?" and do I need to add a little bit more of this or that. My grandmother passed the recipe down to me and it was never really written down, just measure it all out with a cup (any cup as long as you use the same for everything).
I'd personally like to see the difference without an electric beater. I think the power of the electric beater continues to aerate the dessert which I think could reduce or cancel out the deflation. Perhaps you'd see more of a difference between gently folding and more vigorous/careless stirring with a spoon or spatula.
yeah id be more interested in seeing that too. ive never thought about folding as the alternative to mixing with a hand mixer or even whisk, both of which still aerate. rather, to me it was always what you were "supposed" to do as opposed to just stirring like normal with the very spatula or spoon that you use to fold. when i saw the video title, my assumption was that adam would be investigating folding vs. regular heavy stirring with a spatula/spoon, not a mixer. a mixer or whisk have never been part of the folding equation in my head. because only recently have i had proof of how much regular stirring with a solid, flat tool DOES for sure deflate air bubbles. i make swiss meringue buttercream, which spends a very long time whipping in the stand mixer with the whisk attachment, first to make the meringue, and then during and after the incorporation of butter. but after all the ingredients have been added, you switch to the paddle attachment and let it mix on low, literally just to make the buttercream look smoother by knocking out all the little remaining air bubbles. you have to use the paddle attachment for this, the whisk wont do it, or you can do it by hand by slowly stirring and pressing the buttercream around the bowl with a spatula. basically doing exactly what youre trying to avoid with folding, deflating the air in the mixture with the broad, solid surface of the tool. so id really doubt that folding vs stirring with spatula would have results as similar as the video had with the electric mixer. maybe it wouldnt be drastic, or the difference would be less important for certain things, but because of the principle that i now literally see at work with the buttercream, i have to think that folding does actually have a leg to stand on, so long as youre talking about conserving air bubbles in mixtures that cant just be whisked.
Try doing the folding action with whisk in your next recipe. Next to no difference in my experience with all things that conventionally requires folding. If anything, whisk helps emulsify the mixture more thoroughly, resulting in a more even risen baked goods (like seen in Adam's souffle in this video).
@@sarahmcdonough7713 yeah, folding vs electric mixer is not an appropriate comparison. Folding vs circular mixing with the same tool would be more of a fair test. You just introduced multiple variables making it impossible to tell which one is doing what
Almost wrote this myself before I saw your comment. That's the real comparison - the wooden spoon of the olden days. I would also like to see something like macarons where it's not just about combining but about achieving a specific texture. Would you be more likely to blow past it with a electric beater or would you over-aerate because you actually do need reduce some bubbles
me with a goatee is probably saying: "this folding technique isn't far off from what the traditional mixing technique makes but if you want to waste more seconds from your ever decreasing life time then yeah use it. Long live the empire."
I stopped folding because I couldnt fully understand how using an electric mixer would deflate the batter when it was also technically putting a lot of air in the batter as well. Then again I always bake for family and friends so I didnt care too much about how it looked overall as long as it tastes good, thats perfectly fine with me.
The only drawback I POTENTIALLY see is that the window of error is much smaller than w/ folding, and you need a good eye to determine what the right consistency SHOULD be; Adam taking like 20-30 seconds with the power tool illustrates that. It also helped a LOT that he has an amazing eye for this stuff, AND had the folded product as a visual reference I'm still gonna try to incorporate this into my desserts (I'd love to not need to clean an additional spatula when making the macaron recipe I stole from Adam, NOT TO MENTION prevent carpal tunnel), but I'd say a good practice is the first time you encounter a new mixture that asks for folding, do it the traditional way a few times to develop your eye for your target consistency; when you're comfortable with that, try doing it both ways like Adam did in this experiment, using the folded one as a reference to get a feel of how long your mixer takes (after all, every mixer is different!). This both gets you more familiar with the consistency this mixture should need AND will aid in finding any individual cases where folding actually IS needed (if any LOL)
That is an excellent point, and Adam really is very good at cooking "by eye". I aspire to that skill, but someone who hasn't honed that ability might do well with folding, at least the first few times.
Power tool on macaron batter totally works because I've tried it before. Just make sure you stop short of the signature 'lava' consistency and do the last few strokes with spatula if you're looking for a traditional look (smooth top with feet). Another bullshit regarding macaron are all the recipe with weirdly specific number in gram for weight of every ingredient. My go-to macaron recipe is equal weight of everything (egg white, granulated sugar, powdered sugar, almond powder) using swiss meringue method. No 112g of this 134g of that bs.. I just weigh out the egg white (which varies each time) and weigh out other ingredients to the same weight.
Spatula is easier to clean than the elecrric mixer. And how tf do you get carpal tunnel from folding with a spatula? What are you doing, trying to fold like an electric mixer?
@@Checkmate1138 They may already have carpal tunnel and don't want to aggravate it. Plus, your electric mixer is probably already dirty from beating the egg whites so the spatula becomes the extra dish.
@@Checkmate1138 it is indeed far easier to clean the spatula, but I'm already getting the mixer dirty when beating the egg whites at the beginning of the recipe (should've specified sry), so I might as well not dirty an additional utensil As for the carpal tunnel, my methods are extremely stylish and dangerous
I always found that folding worked better because pulling the peaks up through the flour made it so that flour sticks to the peaks and any excess flour falls off the sides in a very gentle way. It's why they recommend folding through only a little bit of dry ingredients at a time because too much flour is too heavy for folding and will pop all the air out of the peaks.
I strictly use real vanilla. Not for taste reasons, but because...well, butts. Beaver butts specifically. It's where they get some artificial vanilla flavoring.
@@fazzitron Beaver butt juice aka castoreum is a lot less plentiful than wood, which is where they get an overwhelming majority of artificial vanillin. The only reason you'd ever consume castoreum is if you decided artificial ""unnatural"" wood-derived vanillin was worse than beaver juice, and so you sought it out. It's not cheap.
The common consensus nowadays for artificial vanillin vs natural vanilla is that people can't tell the difference in baked goods; the hundreds of other flavor compounds in natural stuff doesn't survive baking. But in something like ice cream, you can actually taste the other compounds. As for the different types of natural vanilla, I'm also curious about the differences. It seems like whole vanilla beans, bean pastes, and real vanilla extracts are used interchangeably.
If it's vanilla bean extract/paste, or bourbon vanilla, or madagascar vanilla, then it should be from real vanilla. "Natural vanilla flavour" may come from beaver butts (it is not an artificial source at all), but far more likely it is from genetically engineered microorganisms who have been engineered to produce vanillin. "Artificial vanilla flavour" tends to be made from wood and paper.
@@fazzitron Maybe that was in the case in the past, but they definitely have more efficient ways now of synthesizing artificial vanilla flavor in labs (instead of harvesting beavers)
Saw this at 12am. It's now 1:36am and my cake + custard are cooling (didn't have cream to whip into it so I added cinnamon and clove, is pretty good) Thanks for the recipe! Edit: couldn't wait, broke off a bite of cake and OMG! NONE of the angel food cakes I've bought have been this good
I always considered 'folding' vs 'mixing' the same as instructions that say to 'hand tighten'. Of course it doesn't matter if it is hand tightened or not, it's simply there to prevent over torquing the fastener. Sometimes life is simpler than we're told. Yeah, just don't overmix it and you're fine.
Yeah, had some "hand tighten" fittings on a plumbing fixture... which then worked its way loose and leaked. They apparently assumed the user would have beefy, plumber hands, not the noodly ones I use for programming.
@@Corrodias There's a big difference between my hand tight and my husband's. I let him tighten plumbing stuff, but after one bulging and very leaky oilpan gasket, I do the automotive stuff :)
I wonder if there is a difference when hand mixing. A power tool is a serious game changer and may have made folding obsolete the way whipping cream cold is obsolete. But hand hand speeds, is there a difference? Enough of a difference to make folding worth it.
That's exactly what I am thinking. Is it possible that the powered mixer actually introduces air and fluffs up the mixture? making folding obsolete. I do think that there might be some instances where folding may be necessary for the desired result, especially when mixing too vigorously might make two different substances completely separate, but IDK...
i think mixing with a spoon or spatula would definitely deflate it a fair amount. with a whisk, it more easily glides through the egg whites and makes less contact with the foam but it also whips *more* air into it. smashing it around with something flat or wide would definitely deflate it.
@@step4560 That's what I think. I have already tested it, and my hypothesis is that hand mixing is too slow to introduce air into the foam and too fast to keep the foam with the air previously introduced. And using a power tool its enough to introduce air into the foam, compensating the air loss of the mixing. (I'm sorry if my english is bad, I'm not a native speaker).
Ice cold whipping cream with an ice cold bowl and utensils does make a much better and longer lasting whip cream. That said folding egg whites rather than mixing doesn't make a difference that is bad. A mixer is better because you can add more air and make it more homogeneous.
The sentence “this ain’t rocket science, it’s cake” pretty much undoes about a century’s worth of baker’s wisdom, and yet, it proves true time and time again. I don’t fold, I don’t sift, I don’t do a true autolyze rest (only the half-assed kind), I don’t preheat, I melt chocolate in the microwave, and I could go on - and yet I manage to make excellent baked goods, mostly by accident.
Pre-heating is worth doing for certain things like a pizza. But for baked goods that will be in the oven for an hour or more I don't see the point in pre-heating.
Masterpieces made by accident tend to taste the best, but come with a hefty drawback - you can't for the life of yours recreate that taste/texture/look...
@@nanoflower1 My wife always gives me shit about not fully preheating for things like frozen foods that need to just be reheated. I always point out that when the timer is done we are going to check temps and if not done, we are going to put them back in the oven. so it really does NOT matter that I started the 15 minute when the oven was not fully pre heated!
And try teaching that to a class of novice cooks and getting consistently good results... "Baker's wisdom" is there to minimize the risk of failure for any person attempting to cook.
Another recipe I might have tried is a whipped chocolate mousse. Traditional technique tells us to mix about a third of the whipped cream with the ganache to lighten it, then fold the rest in. I wonder if that actually makes a qualitative difference over just mixing it all together.
Ok I have my theory: maybe the reason why using beaters doesn't deflate foams is that it might actually add more air to them; we usually use the electric beater to whip up eggs and cream, and that same action might help these two ingredients to keep air inside of them when being mixed with other stuff. It would have been interesting to see if using a spatula to violently mix the ingredients made any difference
That's the thought I had in the back of my mind as well. If you're going to go to the effort of violently stirring by hand though you might as well just fold. I think the point was to prove that you can do the process easier with an electric beater.
I was literally rolling on the floor laughing watching this episode. I am a pastry chef and I do feel like you were folding wrong 😂 I was always taught that you sacrifice a little of your fluffy part (like whipped cream ) to your denser product (like melted chocolate and eggs) by adding a scoop of whipped cream to the melted chocolate and mixing it in. The goal being that you are making the two products a little more similar in denseness so that when you fold them together they mix more easily and you don't have to fold as many times and therefore keep more of the volume. But I do agree that there are times when folding seems to not really do anything. Love your channel!!!
I came to the comments to see if anyone was criticizing his technique. I'm just a home chef, but I thought turning the bowl each fold was necessary so you don't fold in the same spot over and over, but instead incorporate the mixture evenly throughout. I thought I noticed a difference when I used this method while making japanese-style jiggly pancakes.
I’ve been wondering about this for so long! I’m writing this at the start of the video and I’m super excited to see how it goes. My thinking has always been “if the mixer can mix air into one thing, why can’t it mix air into two things while blending those things at the same time?”. Edit: just got to the end. I KNEW IT! This just makes sense! Btw, I REALLY love that you do videos like this where you test things and that your very anti ‘tradition for tradition’s sake’, assuming I understand you correctly. Traditions and the way humans just do things “cause it’s how it’s done” without thinking about it, is one of my biggest pet peeves.
I've been making Japanese cheesecake over Christmas and just dumping the batter into the egg foam and turning on my beater is so much more efficient than me trying to "fold" them in. I get a much better product too that's a lot fluffier than anything I had before. I can't believe I wasted so much time trying to fold my batter in.
I never went for the mixer but I never bothered with folding either. I just stir for a minute and try not to eat the whole batter before it goes in the oven. My dad insists on folding but there's never been a large enough difference between him doing the recipe vs me to start folding Edit: and you don't have to beat the eggs before putting in the sugar either, I just do it all at once. Comes out fine
If your batter has raw flour in it, don’t consume any of it before cooking. Contrary to what most people think the dangers of eating cookie dough are, it’s much more rarely the eggs, but rather the flour that is a danger. There’s a ChubbyEmu about this as well: ua-cam.com/video/Cwa8PdtWapE/v-deo.html
@@puellanivis That risk is still not that high of a risk for most ppl; its only a true concern for those who are at grter risk esp cuz its likely not even contaminated to begin with. It however matters a ton in restaurants or in food manufscturin where such risks are multiplied a ton.
maybe the wisdom comes from the time before beaters? Maybe beaters are not only great at mixing stuff together, maybe it's also great at adding air to it too and so instead of losing air by mixing u actually get more by beating. Just spit balling.
@@puellanivis >it’s much more rarely the eggs, but rather the flour that is a danger >links a video about an HIV positive old woman infected with salmonella from raw eggs I trusted you
Maybe it could stem from less stable eggs? Without stabilizer as well? Or maybe hand mixing with a whisk can cause problems (if you go super super hard). Basically if folding is true, the assumption is that there are bubbles that will pop only if force is greater than value X. So long as force is below you can mix for a long time without added popping. And to get that I would assume you'd need a more finicky foam, something you were struggling to actually get made properly before even considering mixing. If you had eggs that didn't like to make foam, or some other variable that could create the situation.
I'm thinking that the difference comes from the fact that they used to use hand whipped foams that were less stable to begin with, making it harder to keep the bubbles that you do have through a mixing process. His foams were all made by a machine before he mixed them with other things.
@@shawnpitman876 I'd agree with this. Hand wipping eggs isn't fun. You want to bail as soon as possible. With a beater you can overshoot the minimum and get a stabler result. At least, that's my theory.
I guess it could be attributed to mixing it with a powered hand beater rather than mixing it in with a wooden spoon or silicon spatula. I always assumed that folding was the gentle alternative back when they didn’t have power tools, so I gave powered beating a try a couple of years ago while making Belgian waffle mix, and I also found that beating the final mix in manages to introduce the air that would have been lost if mixing in by hand
This test doesn't really work with a hand or electric whisk/mixer, because that still aerates the mixture, thereby cancelling out any deflation from more aggressive agitation. This should have been proper folding versus stirring. As in, with a wooden spoon or spatula. There, we'd really see if it makes a difference or not.
I've been doing this for decades and thought I was crazy and/or lazy. The top recipe I do this with is tiramisu and I always get compliments on how light and fluffy it is!
I think this technique would have made more sense when electric mixers didn't exist. Would be interesting to see the difference compared to whisking in the flower by hand. Maybe the extra speed the electric whisk makes a difference. Idk, all I know is that my chef yells at me when I use a whisk while making chocolate mousse.
Idea: Do it again, entirely by hand. I suspect that the power mixer is pushing air back into the foam, thus preventing loss. Many of these old rules came in the days before power tools, and if you mixed a soufle too roughly you might end up with a pancake.
Diminimus is a huge part of college chemistry albeit not phrased that way. There are quantities in calculations that are so ridiculously small that you can just omit them. In buffer problems for example, we can just omit some numbers if they are to small which prevents us from having to use the quadratic formula.
lowkey offtopic but reading this comment a week after finishing my accelerated chem 2 course simultaneously made me proud that i now know exactly what you're talking about and scarred because dear lord i did more buffer problems in one week than any human should.
Yeah in Engineering we just say insignificant, or that we are neglecting something. Instead of sounding like a giant tool with a Latin phrase intended to make you sound smarter
I really love that you're stressing the idea that sure, a lot of factors can make a difference, but often that difference is so minimal that it really isn't noticeable. I always get so annoyed when people stress over baking saying "It's a science!" Because yeah there is a scientific component to it all, but the kitchen is not a lab space and you just don't need the precision! I work in a lab now and we are always told to treat our science more like cooking, as long as you have things looking how they're supposed to at every step, it's more than likely fine!
There are sciency bits and less sciency bits. When you're looking to modify a recipe, it's important to have some sense of which are which, and what you might need to do if you're modifying something a bit sciency. If you just replace the orange juice in cranberry orange muffins with pear juice, you're not likely to get muffins; to succeed you'll need to swap out the baking soda for an appropriate amount of baking powder. If you add a whole bunch of sugar to a yeasted dough recipe without using extra yeast or special osmotolerant yeast, it's not likely to work out very well. If you try to make a random bread salt free, again, you're likely to run into some challenges.
Could this be the cream of tartar stabilizing your foam to the point where the beating it takes simply makes no difference? you aught to try just standard egg whites whipped vs tartar, it might matter with the folding then
Love the vid! Always nice to see old cooking myths debunked. One note about the ice bath: If I didn't visually underestimate the amount of salt you added by orders of magnitude,, the salt probably didn't do much after you added the additional water. The trick usually lies in the fact that first, you add enough salt in solutions like these to get a (close to) saturated salt solution with the melted ice and second, that the salt solution you achieve has a lower melting point than the temperature of the ice you throw in. In that scenario, the ice is 'forced' to melt and to do so, it pulls energy from the surroundings to liquify. If you add excess water, the solution is only ever gonna cool too the melting point of the solution you create (usually not far from 0°C in dilute solutions) and additionally, it may only cool via conduction (not via the 'forced' melting mechanism), defeating the point of the ice + salt method for rapid cooling of small volumina
You do know there are reasons to fold that aren't about stabilizing or destabilizing foam. Like in a baked cheesecake a lot of recipes call to fold in the ingredients in order to reduce bubbles to decrease cracking. and having baked my fair share of cheesecakes I can say it does make a difference. But yeah with foams I often just use the mixer it ends up more homogenous and the stability is fine.
To be fair, he literally asked for people to suggest circumstances where folding might be advantageous in the comments, he just hadn’t come across such a situation yet in testing.
I don't know what you're doing differently, but using cold cream absolutely does help it beat up better, or at least it does for me. I've tested it both ways and, on a hot summer day, I've had cream turn halfway into butter before ever whipping up properly. Cold cream never does that.
I've been mixing (by hand) instead of folding for a little while, and never noticed a difference. But since I never ran true side by side tests, I always had doubts; thanks for yet another video that sheds light on the reasons (or lack thereof) of why we do things the way we do.
Hey Adam, I have a recipe for a chocolate cheesecake which includes whipped whites, yolk and whipped cream. I notice a distinct difference if I fold lightly or combine less carefully. Interestingly I actually find that folding a bit more aggressively yields a firmer cheesecake rather than a mousey texture and I prefer that. I wonder if it's because the cheesecake is completely uncooked. I can pass one the recipe if you are interested in experimentation!
Thanks for injecting some science into the world of cooking. I often get tired of hearing that you "have to" do something a certain way because of reasons that have never been verified.
I can't picture putting the effort in to make sure I actually would fold things like this so that's great news. My strategy of "just wing it and hope for the best" continues to sort of work!
My suspicion is that this comes from the same place that "whipping cold cream" comes from, as you mentioned. Back then, anything to make things easier was better. Back then, whipping eggs or cream until stiff peaks would have made your arms ache. To then add the other ingredients and start whipping again probably wasn't exactly something they were excited to do. So folding the stuff in was just "easier". It'd be interesting to see an experiment to see how much harder one is over the other when doing all of the mixing/beating by hand.
@@FPVkitchen it’s probably a climate thing, I’d assume warmer climates it’s harder. Do you whip by hand? Any decent hand mixer nowadays should be able to do it. But ours was broken for a while and was very weak. And we had to get everything as cold as possible for whipping. When baking inconsistencies occur, it’s almost always climate based in my experience
@@FPVkitchen that's really weird. Might have to do with mixer strength, or the kind of cream you use. If you haven't maybe try a different cream, or just whip it cold. If it ain't broken don't fix it
@@marijnlastname3132 All the professional French pastry chefs that I watched specifically told to use only ice-cold heavy cream. I don't see the point in changing the mixer or cream when I can simply use ice-cold cream and get the perfect result.
Your video content actually revealed the reason why folding emerged as a technique. I am referring to the passage about tempering. To prevent the risk of over-beating the mixture by using a whisk or beater, the cook switches to a spatula as a safeguard.
I watched the 'what if there's fat in the egg whites' video not long ago, and I appreciated seeing the 'wrong' outcome. It would have been interesting to see a third experimental condition showing what happens if you do get too aggressive with the power tools.
Russian way to make cake is to whip whole eggs with little vinegar, salt and sugar before adding flour with soda. It doesnt inflate much in oven and deflate to almost original volume after bakung done.
FABULOUS. I have wondered this for years, but couldn't be arsed to actually try a side-by-side experiment myself. Thank you for both the answer and for saving me the trouble.
Adam, my pastry chef instructor when i attended the Institute of Culinary Education taught us to fold certain foams using a whisk. go down the middle, turn the bowl, then scrape the side and repeat. using the whisk doesn’t deflate whatever foam and the individual legs of the whisk make it easier to cut the two (parts you’re mixing together) so that they emulsify with less effort. folding with a silicone spat is very necessary with certain recipes. i like to use a spat when folding french macaroon batter. good video!
Especially because cream of tartar isn’t usually used in baked egg white preparation since it adds unpleasant flavor. Joconde bisquite is a good example of a situation where cream of tartar just tastes acrid and distracting.
@@g33xzi11a Using a copper bowl with a tiny bit of salt creates an equivalent acid reaction that will stabilize the egg foam. The cream of tarter is a substitute if you don't have a copper bowl. And in the spirit of this video, there have been experiments on that as well.
Hey Adam, just a little question here: Would the cream of tartar be a changing factor in this experiment? You could imagine back when the whole folding thing was invented, people would be working with a less stable foam. Cheers!
This experiment is mainly, "is this practical for home chefs now" rather than when this was invented, still probably fairly accurate, just as long as it wasn't overmixed (which can be easier to achieve with folding.)
I rarely ever use cream of tartar in recipes, or any stabilizing agent. When I saw him add it, I had exactly the same thought. Does having that extra stabilization help?
I think it would be that plus when this became a thing these chefs were likely making a lot larger batches and perhaps at a larger scale it is easier to overmix if not folding.
@@BrainStewification Probably not, I find CoT only helps for long term stabilization for uncooked foams (e.g. whipped cream). If you're cooking the foam it's pointless.
You add an acid to the egg whites to neutralize some of the alkalinity. Lemon juice and vinegar work fine. I personally always use lemon juice and the meringue comes out great.
The salt+ice trick only works if you don't add water to the mix. Even then, you'd need at least 33g of salt for 100g of crushed ice and a good mixing to go down to -16°C.
I would like to see a follow-up video where Adam does all the mixing by hand as I think the hand mixer incopoates more air and that's why it doesn't deflate. Where as mixing vigorously by hand would knock out more air than it puts in.
Did you place the two cakes in the oven at the same time? So one cake mixture (the first one) was sitting waiting outside while the other was being made. This means it has time to deflate at room temp for 5-10 mins before both went into the oven at the same times IF this is the case, then maybe de minimus does not apply here as that is in my opinion a significant variable. How long the cake stands and waits outside before being put in the oven.
If the whipped whites are stabilized then 10 or even 15 minutes will not affect the volume. Leave whipped whites with cream of tartare and look for yourself how long it takes to deflate.
@@heksogen4788 stabilizing the whites didn’t help either angel food cake in the end- both were flat and dense. And the one that was mixed first deflated more than the one put straight in the oven after mixing.
I think I've watched one of your videos and saw you beating the mixer instead of folding. That's when I found out that folding is not necessary. Either way, I'm very thankful for your experiments. Ty
You, mister, just got my sub. I thought I knew this topic pretty well. For reference, I had over a dozen offers (from serious people) to open restaurants/bakeries/coffee shops after they tasted my bread/coffee/pastry/desserts/etc. And I would maybe do it if I was naive enough to think doing it for fun is the same as doing it professionally. Anyway, waiting for some more wisdom. Keep it coming.
This was such a fascinating and ironically groundbreaking video. I always wonder what traditional cooking techniques, that have been passed down, may be groundless, or no longer serve a purpose in a modern kitchen. This is why I love your channel. I appreciate your mindfulness and skepticism. I'm excited to see more content about other potentially debatable culinary methods. Also, it would've been interesting to have had a third experiment group to test if whisking the mixtures by hand would've had no effect on the final dish. If the result is a trivial change, then it would take your conclusion a step further by essentially saying even without an electric mixer (a kitchen power tool), folding is still unnecessary.
Thank you! I have long suspected that folding was not that much gentler than careful mixing, though I have never tested it. Each stroke may be more gentle, but you need more of them. Just don't overbeat and you're good.
My impression is that cooking is filled with superstition, so we keep following old ways just because "it's the way it's always been done before". One of my friends _insisted_ that the only way to make mayonnaise was by slowly dripping the oil, making it a long annoying procedure. He was so insistent on it that I made mayonnaise by using a regular blender and adding the oil in a thin stream. It came out perfectly in just 2-3 minutes. I threatened to make another batch with a food processor, which allows for the oil to be added in a thicker stream and be done even faster, but he relented. Thing is, I know plenty of people who add all the oil at once and get it done in just seconds with an immersion blender -- however, that method has never worked well for me, and I know that if I were willing to try many times (and ruin many batches) I'd be able to do it too, I just haven't done that yet. In any case, decades ago, when Cook's Illustrated was a new magazine, they published an article about how folding is not necessary, just turn on the mixer on lowest speed and mix for a few seconds. I thought that was great, because that's exactly what my mom used to do. In case it matters, my mom's education was in Home Ec (she graduated in the 50's, when everything was very "sciency"), so maybe they were onto something there. Sadly, it's decades later and Cook's Illustrated (and America's Test Kitchen) seem to have forgotten all about that article, they keep telling people to fold stuff now. Maybe they found out when/why the mixer fails and forgot to tell us, or I missed an issue or ten of their magazines. I think it's more likely all the new people they hired came straight out of cooking school and have never heard of just using the mixer and things went backwards. Oh, well.
The immersion blender mayonnaise is so easy. Just make sure the container is just barely wider than the blender. Also, add the oil to the container last so all the other ingredients sit underneath. Then just put the blender all the way to the bottom before turning it on and keep it flat against the bottom until it starts to turn into mayonnaise.
Really enjoyed this and will refer to your video from now on when I teach someone to make a soufflé. Great to take pressure off, make things easier. But for myself ... I don't use an electric beater, do my egg whites with a whisk and a copper bowl, fold with a spatula of just the resistance i like, and take pleasure in performing every step of these practiced techniques. To each her own :-) I love your experiments! Fun learning from you.
Many recipes call to incorporate one third of the whipped product to “lighten” it up, then fold in the rest. I have never found this to make any difference. You have helped reinforce my suspicions.
Ooh this is a tricky one. I would say it does in some cases. A good illustration is the souffle he made in this video. Notice how as Adam adds yolk to the chocolate mixture it breaks (fat separate from solid)? When this happens to me, I always incorporate the first third of egg white the way GR did in this video: ua-cam.com/video/2c4MewNvc5Y/v-deo.html. This serves to bring the balance of fat and liquid phase back so that they emulsify better (and somewhat lighten the mixture too). Then I incorporate the rest in - at this point Adam's conclusion comes into play so whether you whisk or fold it will come out the same.
you we're right in what you said earlier, folding ensures you dont over mix whilst maintaining the bubbles of any mixure, unfortunately its very easy to over mix with electric mixers and then you get a consistency problem when you move onto bulk/batch cooking/baking, coming from a pastry trained chef! i do however agree that if you have some self-control when using an electric mixer and only whisk until together with smaller batches you will get the same result as folding.
I dont normally comment but im just going to go ahead and throw this one out, Adam, I love your videos. The way you mix food and cooking with science is fascinating to listen to, I always feel like I walk away having learned something new.
possible reason for this is that before our electric hand mixers, instead of folding, you would be stirring. Using an electric hand mixer is bringing aerating the mixture in a way that you just couldn't do by hand.
I really enjoy your videos! Thanks to this one, I found out making ice-cream is VERY easy. I trued your method and used the mixer instead of folding in the condensed milk and it turned out wonderfully well!
You should try making the “beat” versions before the fold versions, as the longer the rest time the more air bubbles can collapse … you’ve biased the “beat” versions as they have less “hang around” time, if you still can’t see the difference you may have a point but I noticed that with the “beat” angel food cake the top surface was lower in the middle than the sides whereas the fold version was relatively flat but maybe that was just that particular cut …
I was thinking the exact same thing! Obviously for the most controlled experiment you’d want to make them at the same time, but perhaps they could be made one at a time (not baked at the same time). I’d be super curious to see if time between batter prep and bake makes a noticeable difference
I believe the concept of folding is good practice. Teaching a new baker how and why to fold teaches them the value of NOT over mixing. You even mention this concept in the experiments: "still being careful not to overdo it." It's much harder to overdo folding because it's slow and concise. It is SO MUCH easier to let a stand mixer go to town while you walk away, resulting in broken foams or tough gluten networks. And trust me when I say, people will walk away if you give them the chance. And most recipes you find online are written with these people in mind. So yeah, absolutely if you are an experienced baker (and I don't mean only professional chefs, Adam absolutely counts as having experience) you can go with the electric mixer for the few seconds to incorporate foam. Someone who has the experience has a better understanding of consistency and the knowledge of what over mixing does. But if I were working with a fresh faced baker or even a child, I would start with folding.
I’ve had a feeling folding was BS for a while, but didn’t have any data to back it up. Glad to see that I can use a hand mixer without worrying about it.
This video was amazing. I think the folding is also to prevent gluten development, but the tests with the electric mixer didn’t seem to have a more glutinous crumb. I’d be interested in seeing a follow-up video on how much mixing is “too much” for cakes/brownies. Edit: grammar
I think that when you have relatively little flour (compared to something like a bread dough) and you only mix it for a short time, just enough to get the batter homogeneous, there's little risk of developing too much gluten. It takes quite a lot of work to get good gluten going.
I've wondered this too! Thanks for approaching this, Adam. I've noticed that on occasions when I make macarons the mixture does not always loosen up as much as is recommended during the 'macronage' process. I have, at times, taken a wooden spoon to the mixture and stirred it as fast as I can until it develops that sought-after lava consistency, and the macarons turn-out perfectly each time. All the online guides (except your brilliantly relaxed recipe :-p ) strongly advise to carefully fold the mixture to keep as much air in as possible. It got me thinking how much use the folding process was.
It's been years that I doubted the effectiveness of "Folding" and not being very "professional" sometimes I felt my "folding" was crushing the foam too much. So... I didn't go all the way to mixing with power tool, but Instead I invented my own "Folding" done not with a spatula or flat spoon - but rather with a Whisk! same movements + rotating the whisk a little did wonderful job. It never "fell" in volume, it merged 3 times faster than folding, and it was not violent at all, so I felt I didn't change from the recommended "delicate handling" of the process. Adam, try this next time. It may be preferable to both "ends" of your test case "Folding" and "Power mixing". Of course I didn't experiment like you did - as No one pays me to do that, but after doing these experiments, you may appreciate my point here. Thanks anyway, next time we're in a hurry we'll know there is no problem with just mixing. Also - it may allow you to save a dish - if you have either your foam (whipped cream, merengue or other) or the other liquid (fatty or not) in the Mixer's bowl - you could simply pour the other in, and continue with the mixer and its "guitar" head. would be both faster, more efficient - and now we know - should also work fine.
What if you made the meringue without cream of tartar? is it possible the cream of tartar is stabilizing the mixture to the point folding and mixing are the same?
I agree with the home cook argument.. honestly I have years worth of experience in very detail oriented cooking and I can tell you that the way you used different techniques for your experiement doesn't allow me or professional cooks to make any conclusion about the topic. many times it's not only a matter of deflating but having control over the consistency (for example macarons)
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No
@@KirbyTheKirby it’s time traveling duh
@@KirbyTheKirby scheduling
We have to return back Marty, things have gone terrbily wrong! Back to where? BACK TO THE FUTURE!
Adam, I recently made homemade lemonade with Oleo-Saccharum. It was my first time doing it and I was amazed! Can you break down the science behind this? Are there other fruits where I can get a similar results other than citrus?
I think part of why folding is recommended is because overmixing definitely IS a concern for a lot of these recipes, and folding simply makes it harder to overmix, or at least keeps the overmixing to a minimum. A couple of extra folds probably isn’t going to ruin your dessert, but a couple of extra seconds of full-speed egg beater action might.
I think this is a particularly compelling reason for newer bakers to stick to folding, whereas an experienced home cook like Adam or a professional is likely to have a better sense of when to stop.
@@muhammadmousa4192 makes sense, but you'd have to think this rule evolved before modern mixers. it's much harder to manually over beat your batter unless you're like punching it. that adds another layer
It also makes it extremely easy to undermix and then you just have nasty cake
One thing Adam didn’t do is try manually beating the mixtures for his non-fold test versions instead of using the electric mixer. It therefore may be possible that it is this method which knocks out a problematic amount of air before all the ingredients are fully incorporated into a homogenous mixture. And if that’s the case, it would make perfect since why folding was advised as an alternative, since that was the _only_ way you could beat something together until relatively recently.
@@muhammadmousa4192
There’s an easy fix to that, which I know Chef John has used for other batters that are important not to overmix- instruct people to stop _just before_ everything is fully combined. A common way to describe that would be for example “mix until there are only a couple small streaks visible”.
With this advice, one of two things are likely to happen:
First, they do exactly that, in which case it is almost certain that those streaks will disappear in the process of the substance being transferred wherever it needs to go. And even if 0.01% is left not entirely incorporated… who cares? It’s very unlikely to matter.
Or second, they mix just a bit “too much”… but because of how you instructed them, that only means they mixed it just to the point of being 100% combined, which is perfect anyway!
This is essentially the same thing as how meetings often start in actuality 5-10 minutes later than people are told they will beforehand. There’s a certain irreducible number who will always be a bit late, so you just simply have to shift back their frame of reference for “on time” to account for that. Meanwhile the people who are punctual just have to do a bit of waiting and idle chat, which is vastly preferable to others missing the start of the meeting.
Ive watched some videos of a Japanese pastry chefs doing those Japanese jiggly desserts and she would always say folding is not necessary she would always remind her viewers how shes a professional baker and knows what shes doing cus someone would always attack her about it.
_'...someone would always attack her about it.'_ Gotta love UA-cam comments! 😂
@@anonnymous4684 ... says the youtube comment
@@CaTastrophy427 ??????
@@CaTastrophy427 says the youtube comment
@@n.itrogen says the UA-cam comment. Fuck this is gonna start a chain.
The pastry chef of the Culinary institute I went to always maintained this idea. He taught us to just use a whisk slowly and stop once it looks combined. Never folding anything ever again.
VERY underrated comment; this should be the top one.
As many here have been pointing out, contrary to Adam's hypothetical snooty pastry instructor, the real benefit of the "fold" seems to be to the *less* experienced cook, because of the control it gives you when the stakes are high and the margin of error demands respect.
Straight from the *actual* professor's mouth, then, the whisk is the clear answer, with every advantage and no drawback. It's as fast and unfussy as you need to be in practice (in fact *especially* for the smaller batches of the home cook), yet it gives you the control to be aware of your progress and stop before it's too late.
Alternately: I fold pancake batter, because I really value that exceptionally tender gluten-barely-there texture. Maybe I’m just counteracting an instinct to overmix…
@@oldvlognewtricks Just use half water and half vodka, stir as normal. When you serve the pancakes, you'll have had enough vodka that you don't care.
This is what I do. I use almost a folding motion with a whisk, yes, but everything gets incorporated with many fewer strokes and it's still easier to control over-mixing.
I have a hand and stand mixer but almost everything that doesn't have a softened butter base, I just mix by hand.
I'm far from a professional, or even super experienced (I'm what you call super broke so I can't bake often, though I've been baking on my own since I was allowed to use an oven and from scratch since I was like 14 or 15 so I have at least a smidge of exp. haha) Anywho, back on topic, the only time I really fold is when something is too thin for me to want to use the hand mixer on even low. But I'm lazy and hate cleaning. lol Or when I'm really new to a specific recipe and that's to slow things down so I can learn more about the stages of it's mixing.
When I used to make a sponge cake almost every week, I tried 'not folding', but I found it hard to avoid over-mixing (I can be absent-minded at times), so I went back to folding. But when I didn't space out, I couldn't tell the difference either.
Yeah, not sure if it counts as over-mixing, but sponge cakes that re-incorporate the egg yolk end up with noticably larger bubbles and voids when mixed with the egg beater. Which I guess makes sense because then you're whipping air into a thicker batter. Usually people want it to be much finer, so folding is the way to go there.
This channel is truly the spiritual successor to good eats. Using science and experiments to give home cooks practical and scientific knowledge about our cooking.
And I love this De Minimus concept. Kenji Lopez-Alt also has talked about this. We've gotten really good at trying to extract an extra 1% for 'perfect' foods and now we're stepping back to figure out which of these techniques really make a notable impact.
@@iainhansen1047
I 've just realized this and deleted my reply.
Honestly it's a better successor, Good Eats leans a bit too far away from the practical for my tastes. Too many fancy kitchen gadgets, when you have about 8 square feet of counterspace (that's taking into account permanent appliances like the microwave and toaster and things like the dish drainer) like I do, you want to own as few tools as necessary to get the jobs done, and do as many things with hand tools and a couple of bowls as can be done. We've got a stand mixer, but the only place we have room for it is on an extra table in the dining room, we used to have it in the kitchen, but we decided that the counterspace was better served with a microwave (something we use on a daily basis, rather than something we use on a monthly or yearly basis).
I was going to mention Alton Brown being proud of Adam and I found your comment. 😁👍
Also provides good meme and YTP material while we wait for another episode
As a “very schooled (cuisine and) pastry chef” I can say… I absolutely love your content! I learned a lot of myths in culinarily school and in the restaurants I work in. You learn more technique, speed and efficiency as a chef. You can learn more theory and variety as a home cook. It takes time to question these things and test side by side and most chefs don’t have a free minute. Thanks for your content Adam!
😮
My guess is that folding is a technique that was preached to "idiot-proof" some parts of recipes since there's always gonna be someone to ruin things. I remember in highschool chemistry class doing titrations where you're supposed to drip solutions drop by drop and there was always someone who full sent it
Also Adam has experience on his side here. His meringue mixing is just moments from deflating. Meanwhile you can fold for far longer than is necessary without meaningfully harming the foam. Further, I find it odd that he didn’t test the stability of a cold meringue mixing preparation. Heavy cream isn’t a particularly fragile foam, but egg whites are and sure if you bake off a cake or soufflé very quickly then stability doesn’t matter as much since moisture evaporated the batter sets on the airy scaffold. But in a cold preparation stability matters and whisks are molecular wrecking balls in a way that spatulas aren’t so disruption to the protein matrix aren’t trivial in those scenarios.
In their defence titrations are in my opinion one of the most boring parts of chemistry (coming from me who is currently actively studying it and like the subject a lot)
@@g33xzi11a He's also using very small portions. Of course if you're doing an experiment it's going to be harder to tell the difference when the samples are tiny. He should have made full angelfood cakes and full soufflés.
As someone who really likes chemistry, this is a pretty apt comparison. Since I always had a good idea of exactly how much base I needed to finish a titration I could full send it and then stop the titration right when the equilibrium point was reached. But of course it definitely wasn’t the safe way to do it lolol
the point of this experiment in my opinion is to show that these dishes that typically seem intimidating actually have a much wider margin of error than a novice home cook might make them out to be, although I do understand that the experiment in this video could have been carried out better.
i think folding feels more tender and loving which makes you feel like you're putting more care into the food thus making it better
I always thought the folding thing was a way to ensure novice cooks wouldn't destroy what used to be a lot of hard work beating eggs into stiff peaks by accidentally undoing it, so they were told to fold it to be safe.
I always just use gentle stirring or very small bursts of the mixer on low. That way it gets well mixed fast without damaging the eggs.
Yes I would also guess. If you use the mixer it is very easy to overdo it.
And if I write both alternatives into the recipe. Mix on highes power level until the ingredients are combined.. Or mix it gently until the ingredients are combined. I am sure which one will fail more often :D
I’d reckon that if you’re a person with a nice attention to detail and a decent reaction time… like, say, you’re good at fast-paced video games… then the brief blast with high speed may be ideal for you.
As long as I know what level of combination I’m shooting for, what it actually looks like, the thought that I’d keep the mixer on for even an entire second too long seems like an unlikely outcome. Especially since I know, for such a brief action that requires some level of precision, it will have my undivided attention.
On the other hand, if you’re someone who has never picked up an action/platform/fighting video game in your life, and who generally tries to hug the speed limit on the road out of an abundance of caution related to how quickly you react to things… yeah, probably not a good idea.
And there’s no shame in that whatsoever! This isn’t a “hehheh git gud scrubs” thing, everyone’s a bit different out there. What works for one won’t work for another.
The Omnissiah's Wisdom guides the Machine Spirit, techpriest.
As I understood it it's from classical technique, before power tools, folding with a (thin) metal spoon was to differentiate from just stirring the mix together
@@randomjunkohyeah1 I hug the speed limit because I'm afraid of getting pulled over and paying hundreds of dollars.
I actually love folding; I think the act is soothing, the texture is so satisfying, and it makes me feel like a real pastry chef.
I feel like sometimes people are too shy or proud to state the real, maybe softer reason why they do things the way they do, so then they try to justify them with shoddy hard logic.
I also fold foams when I have time, cuz it makes me feel like a pastry chef lmao. Even talk to myself like I'm in a bake off.
I like to fold because there's some tests I can do as an amateur pastry chef to see if it's ready that I can't do with a beater. E.g. the ribbon figure-8 when testing macaron batter consistency
I just like the slower, more mindful action of folding. It's easier to do for longer
@@jbarz I love this comment, as if you have to explain or justify why you like doing things the way you do. Once had a fight with my ex over how I was doing the dishes.. although slower, the way I did it was just more satisfying for me.
Did the same once for Adam's macaron recipe when I felt a bit lazy and they turned out better than any of the ones I made before. Haven't folded since.
I’m boutta try this I’ve made his macaroons before too
Oh my gosh, I’ll have to try this the next time I make macarons.
I got so frustrated folding the almond flour with the egg whites! 😵
This was the question I had! Thanks.
I own a company that makes hundreds of thousands of macarons per year.... thousands per day. We don't fold. The only consideration is making sure you get a homogenous mixture by scraping down the sides of the mixer at intervals.
My husband's grandma still considers angel food cake to be a diet dessert. We did a low carb diet a couple years back and we told her ahead of time that we didn't want her to make any dessert when we came to visit because we were doing a low carb diet. She made an angel food cake for dessert and said she made it special for us since we were on a diet.
To be fair, im sure in a decade the whole anti-carb bandwagon will dispel and give way to a different diet fad. I mean according to the low-carb diet, you can eat as many cheeseburgers (minus the bun) as you want and its perfectly healthy!
If gran gran made it special for you, you HAVE to eat it, that's the rule.
Unless it puts you on health risk, of course
@@UBvtuber carbs are the main thing you can cut nowadays to lose weight + theyre directly linked to diabetes, fats on the other hand have a way harder time getting at you unless you chug unsaturated fats like you dont wanna live lol
@@Arxgxmi wait, specifically unsaturated fats?
@@UBvtuber saturated would be harder to chug since their state is solid at room temp
I do wonder how much of a difference folding would make compared to whisking by hand, because the technique obviously predates electric tools. Perhaps the process of mixing with an electric tool itself generates air bubbles that go some way to equalising what you're losing?
Modern hand whisks haven't been around forever either. Before the 19th century all you had was a bunch of twigs, like Townsends uses, or perhaps finely split bamboo if you were in Asia.
I think thet just noticed that overmixing is a thing and that mixing reduced the foam and then tried to do it as gently as possible.
For a few select deserts maybe some didn't go for a homogenous mix so it appears even fluffyer, and then folding would give you more control.
(I certainly underfolded many deserts as i was overcareful so i can relate haha)
i was thinking this too
Nope. I have been unceremoniously stirring in the foam with a spoon for the longest time. I'm impatient and I used to break all the cooking rules to see if the results will be bad enough to justify the fuff. And the answer was very often 'no'. I never melt chocolate over a double boiler or sieve my flower or do any other traditional things.
@@AnHeC Sieving flour is a tradition born out of old times, when there were impurities in flour. In modern times, every bag of flour i've opened, and i've opened literally hundreds was pristine. There's no truth to better "aeration" with sieving the flour. It's all mixed and dispersed in batter, so if there's any miniscule air that was trapped between grains of flour will probably make no difference when incorporated into batter.
As a trained pastry chef, my take on folding vs. whisking with an electric mixer was always that the mixer will do it better in less time, in most cases. There is a point to be made about lower-end mixers that don't have thin whisk attachments like yours does, because those mixers will absolutely wreck any egg foam in seconds.
My only criticism about the video is about tempering eggs: it's not done so much for protecting the eggs from curdling. Tempering is a technique that's extremely important in a professional kitchen, and especially important when making a big batch of a cream with cooked eggs. Tempering the egg yolks makes the process more time efficient because it actually allows you to boil the milk relatively unattended while you take care of something else, while adding the eggs from the start makes you have to whisk the mixture for the entire time, which is both inefficient and tiresome.
this is an argument for tempering being unneccessary in a home kitchen...since we are not a professional kitchen attempting to maximize our time efficiency. as Adam said, de minimus
More like doing the samething for different reasons.
As a pastry chef, yes on the eggs.
I'll generally only fold in berries, chocolate chips, and other last-ingredients with a tendency to run. I only do this for presentation purposes when serving people who wouldn't want purple pancakes or whatever.
Also, Creme Diplomat is the best cake frosting in the world. There's a really fast way to make it with instant pudding mix and it's amazing on any kind of cake.
Hey purple pancakes just mean the berry flavor is spread throughout the pancake. Nothing to complain about!
I'm team creme mousseline, just for stability! Both delicious
I think that either things like berries, or just getting an excuse to not over-exert under the eyes of blowhards (or to prevent blow-hards from over-exerting...), are probably the secret of it- the rule probably was formulated for a situation that was actually appropriate to it, and some time after that came to be drastically over-applied by people that didn't actually understand the reason for it, who then passed down their misunderstanding instead of the facts behind it. Thus we fold when we shouldn't.
Personally I prefer my blueberry muffins with broken blueberries rather than whole intact ones, found this out after I carefully folded em in one time lol
@Almost Watchable,
And you are going to tell us this easy way when? Like, now?
I found folding to be neccesary when making the modern Russian "variant" of Charlotte cake (Шарлотка), i.e. sponge-cake with yolks and apples.
So at first I was actually using the mixer to add flour into the whipped eggs (containing both yolks&whites), but I wasn't getting the fluff-level I was hoping for. Because the mix was kinda getting clumpy, I was forced to mix longer than you'd want just to get it clump free; and I simply refuse to use baking soda to "fix it". But when I found the folding technique and tried it out, it made a huge difference.
With this recipe it's important to not open the oven too soon (like when you want to check for readiness), otherwise you'll lose a lot of fluff and diminish any gains from the folding.
I can tell you as a native to this recipe, that I never fold it. My mother had always been using her old soviet mixer, and same true for my mother's mother (well, as far as I can remember, her kitchen gadget was older than me, apparently).Me? I sometimes may go even as far as beating the eggs w\o separation, and it works too. Could be something with the recipe itself? In my family it's 3 eggs + 1 glass of white flour + 1 glass of sugar (can be less, if the apples are sweet). Everything had been always been measured with a soviet drinking glass (or "stakan"), which is approximately 250ml. Amount of apples depends on their size, juciness and sweetness.
@@nrieh4553 Yeah, most recipes just suggest using a mixer, and so did my mom.
If I use a mixer it doesn't turn into a complete failure, it still tastes nice. It's just not as fluffy as it could have been.
Now I do have a few deviations that might make a difference:
I refuse to use any salt or bakingsoda no matter what the recipe says; and I usually use less sugar than a recipe suggests.
Russian flour usually has a higher protein content than the flour that's sold where I live (in the netherlands). Antonovka apples are quite high in pectin content, significantly higher than.
The sugar and eggs should be the same.
@@nrieh4553 ahahahah omg my mom still has a mixer that is older than me and I was born in the 80s :))) I remember making lots of charlotkas with it when I was in high school. Yeah we used the same proportions.
@@natalyamartirosyan My mixer is older than my son, 35yo. It’s a Bamix. I use it every day, at least to fluff my bulletproof coffee.
@@nrieh4553 This is the same recipe I have for this as well. I use my mixer too. I am in the the US, for flour and sugar differences. It's really about "how does it feel?" and do I need to add a little bit more of this or that. My grandmother passed the recipe down to me and it was never really written down, just measure it all out with a cup (any cup as long as you use the same for everything).
I'd personally like to see the difference without an electric beater. I think the power of the electric beater continues to aerate the dessert which I think could reduce or cancel out the deflation. Perhaps you'd see more of a difference between gently folding and more vigorous/careless stirring with a spoon or spatula.
yeah id be more interested in seeing that too. ive never thought about folding as the alternative to mixing with a hand mixer or even whisk, both of which still aerate. rather, to me it was always what you were "supposed" to do as opposed to just stirring like normal with the very spatula or spoon that you use to fold. when i saw the video title, my assumption was that adam would be investigating folding vs. regular heavy stirring with a spatula/spoon, not a mixer. a mixer or whisk have never been part of the folding equation in my head.
because only recently have i had proof of how much regular stirring with a solid, flat tool DOES for sure deflate air bubbles. i make swiss meringue buttercream, which spends a very long time whipping in the stand mixer with the whisk attachment, first to make the meringue, and then during and after the incorporation of butter. but after all the ingredients have been added, you switch to the paddle attachment and let it mix on low, literally just to make the buttercream look smoother by knocking out all the little remaining air bubbles. you have to use the paddle attachment for this, the whisk wont do it, or you can do it by hand by slowly stirring and pressing the buttercream around the bowl with a spatula. basically doing exactly what youre trying to avoid with folding, deflating the air in the mixture with the broad, solid surface of the tool. so id really doubt that folding vs stirring with spatula would have results as similar as the video had with the electric mixer. maybe it wouldnt be drastic, or the difference would be less important for certain things, but because of the principle that i now literally see at work with the buttercream, i have to think that folding does actually have a leg to stand on, so long as youre talking about conserving air bubbles in mixtures that cant just be whisked.
Try doing the folding action with whisk in your next recipe. Next to no difference in my experience with all things that conventionally requires folding. If anything, whisk helps emulsify the mixture more thoroughly, resulting in a more even risen baked goods (like seen in Adam's souffle in this video).
@@sarahmcdonough7713 yeah, folding vs electric mixer is not an appropriate comparison. Folding vs circular mixing with the same tool would be more of a fair test. You just introduced multiple variables making it impossible to tell which one is doing what
Almost wrote this myself before I saw your comment. That's the real comparison - the wooden spoon of the olden days. I would also like to see something like macarons where it's not just about combining but about achieving a specific texture. Would you be more likely to blow past it with a electric beater or would you over-aerate because you actually do need reduce some bubbles
One of you skeptics go make this test. Can’t be that hard if you’re convinced
me with a goatee is probably saying: "this folding technique isn't far off from what the traditional mixing technique makes but if you want to waste more seconds from your ever decreasing life time then yeah use it. Long live the empire."
I stopped folding because I couldnt fully understand how using an electric mixer would deflate the batter when it was also technically putting a lot of air in the batter as well. Then again I always bake for family and friends so I didnt care too much about how it looked overall as long as it tastes good, thats perfectly fine with me.
"It's easier to whisk lumps out of a paste when it's really thick" is your catch phrase now. I heard it in two videos back to back.
The only drawback I POTENTIALLY see is that the window of error is much smaller than w/ folding, and you need a good eye to determine what the right consistency SHOULD be; Adam taking like 20-30 seconds with the power tool illustrates that. It also helped a LOT that he has an amazing eye for this stuff, AND had the folded product as a visual reference
I'm still gonna try to incorporate this into my desserts (I'd love to not need to clean an additional spatula when making the macaron recipe I stole from Adam, NOT TO MENTION prevent carpal tunnel), but I'd say a good practice is the first time you encounter a new mixture that asks for folding, do it the traditional way a few times to develop your eye for your target consistency; when you're comfortable with that, try doing it both ways like Adam did in this experiment, using the folded one as a reference to get a feel of how long your mixer takes (after all, every mixer is different!). This both gets you more familiar with the consistency this mixture should need AND will aid in finding any individual cases where folding actually IS needed (if any LOL)
That is an excellent point, and Adam really is very good at cooking "by eye". I aspire to that skill, but someone who hasn't honed that ability might do well with folding, at least the first few times.
Power tool on macaron batter totally works because I've tried it before. Just make sure you stop short of the signature 'lava' consistency and do the last few strokes with spatula if you're looking for a traditional look (smooth top with feet). Another bullshit regarding macaron are all the recipe with weirdly specific number in gram for weight of every ingredient. My go-to macaron recipe is equal weight of everything (egg white, granulated sugar, powdered sugar, almond powder) using swiss meringue method. No 112g of this 134g of that bs.. I just weigh out the egg white (which varies each time) and weigh out other ingredients to the same weight.
Spatula is easier to clean than the elecrric mixer. And how tf do you get carpal tunnel from folding with a spatula? What are you doing, trying to fold like an electric mixer?
@@Checkmate1138 They may already have carpal tunnel and don't want to aggravate it. Plus, your electric mixer is probably already dirty from beating the egg whites so the spatula becomes the extra dish.
@@Checkmate1138 it is indeed far easier to clean the spatula, but I'm already getting the mixer dirty when beating the egg whites at the beginning of the recipe (should've specified sry), so I might as well not dirty an additional utensil
As for the carpal tunnel, my methods are extremely stylish and dangerous
I always found that folding worked better because pulling the peaks up through the flour made it so that flour sticks to the peaks and any excess flour falls off the sides in a very gentle way. It's why they recommend folding through only a little bit of dry ingredients at a time because too much flour is too heavy for folding and will pop all the air out of the peaks.
Really would like to see you comparing different kinds of vanilla and explain whether vanilla does anything or affects dishes a lot.
I strictly use real vanilla. Not for taste reasons, but because...well, butts. Beaver butts specifically. It's where they get some artificial vanilla flavoring.
@@fazzitron Beaver butt juice aka castoreum is a lot less plentiful than wood, which is where they get an overwhelming majority of artificial vanillin. The only reason you'd ever consume castoreum is if you decided artificial ""unnatural"" wood-derived vanillin was worse than beaver juice, and so you sought it out. It's not cheap.
The common consensus nowadays for artificial vanillin vs natural vanilla is that people can't tell the difference in baked goods; the hundreds of other flavor compounds in natural stuff doesn't survive baking. But in something like ice cream, you can actually taste the other compounds.
As for the different types of natural vanilla, I'm also curious about the differences. It seems like whole vanilla beans, bean pastes, and real vanilla extracts are used interchangeably.
If it's vanilla bean extract/paste, or bourbon vanilla, or madagascar vanilla, then it should be from real vanilla.
"Natural vanilla flavour" may come from beaver butts (it is not an artificial source at all), but far more likely it is from genetically engineered microorganisms who have been engineered to produce vanillin.
"Artificial vanilla flavour" tends to be made from wood and paper.
@@fazzitron Maybe that was in the case in the past, but they definitely have more efficient ways now of synthesizing artificial vanilla flavor in labs (instead of harvesting beavers)
Saw this at 12am. It's now 1:36am and my cake + custard are cooling (didn't have cream to whip into it so I added cinnamon and clove, is pretty good)
Thanks for the recipe!
Edit: couldn't wait, broke off a bite of cake and OMG! NONE of the angel food cakes I've bought have been this good
nice
I always considered 'folding' vs 'mixing' the same as instructions that say to 'hand tighten'. Of course it doesn't matter if it is hand tightened or not, it's simply there to prevent over torquing the fastener. Sometimes life is simpler than we're told. Yeah, just don't overmix it and you're fine.
Great analogy and one I finally just learned recently (about over torquing). More isn't always better.
@@TheGreektrojan torque it until it just starts to loosen then back a quarter turn, perfect every time
Yeah, had some "hand tighten" fittings on a plumbing fixture... which then worked its way loose and leaked. They apparently assumed the user would have beefy, plumber hands, not the noodly ones I use for programming.
@@Corrodias There's a big difference between my hand tight and my husband's. I let him tighten plumbing stuff, but after one bulging and very leaky oilpan gasket, I do the automotive stuff :)
I wonder if there is a difference when hand mixing. A power tool is a serious game changer and may have made folding obsolete the way whipping cream cold is obsolete. But hand hand speeds, is there a difference? Enough of a difference to make folding worth it.
That's exactly what I am thinking. Is it possible that the powered mixer actually introduces air and fluffs up the mixture? making folding obsolete. I do think that there might be some instances where folding may be necessary for the desired result, especially when mixing too vigorously might make two different substances completely separate, but IDK...
My thought as well. I would love to see a comparison between folding and stirring.
i think mixing with a spoon or spatula would definitely deflate it a fair amount. with a whisk, it more easily glides through the egg whites and makes less contact with the foam but it also whips *more* air into it. smashing it around with something flat or wide would definitely deflate it.
@@step4560 That's what I think. I have already tested it, and my hypothesis is that hand mixing is too slow to introduce air into the foam and too fast to keep the foam with the air previously introduced. And using a power tool its enough to introduce air into the foam, compensating the air loss of the mixing. (I'm sorry if my english is bad, I'm not a native speaker).
Ice cold whipping cream with an ice cold bowl and utensils does make a much better and longer lasting whip cream.
That said folding egg whites rather than mixing doesn't make a difference that is bad. A mixer is better because you can add more air and make it more homogeneous.
The sentence “this ain’t rocket science, it’s cake” pretty much undoes about a century’s worth of baker’s wisdom, and yet, it proves true time and time again. I don’t fold, I don’t sift, I don’t do a true autolyze rest (only the half-assed kind), I don’t preheat, I melt chocolate in the microwave, and I could go on - and yet I manage to make excellent baked goods, mostly by accident.
Pre-heating is worth doing for certain things like a pizza. But for baked goods that will be in the oven for an hour or more I don't see the point in pre-heating.
Masterpieces made by accident tend to taste the best, but come with a hefty drawback - you can't for the life of yours recreate that taste/texture/look...
@@nanoflower1
Or if you are overcrowding… it can minimize the negative effects. But honestly, I almost never preheat, or only half do it.
@@nanoflower1 My wife always gives me shit about not fully preheating for things like frozen foods that need to just be reheated. I always point out that when the timer is done we are going to check temps and if not done, we are going to put them back in the oven. so it really does NOT matter that I started the 15 minute when the oven was not fully pre heated!
And try teaching that to a class of novice cooks and getting consistently good results...
"Baker's wisdom" is there to minimize the risk of failure for any person attempting to cook.
Another recipe I might have tried is a whipped chocolate mousse. Traditional technique tells us to mix about a third of the whipped cream with the ganache to lighten it, then fold the rest in. I wonder if that actually makes a qualitative difference over just mixing it all together.
I think Adam has a list of fluffy/airy foods for whenever he has a mattress sponsor
This is genuinely mindblowing to me.
Ok I have my theory: maybe the reason why using beaters doesn't deflate foams is that it might actually add more air to them; we usually use the electric beater to whip up eggs and cream, and that same action might help these two ingredients to keep air inside of them when being mixed with other stuff.
It would have been interesting to see if using a spatula to violently mix the ingredients made any difference
That's the thought I had in the back of my mind as well. If you're going to go to the effort of violently stirring by hand though you might as well just fold. I think the point was to prove that you can do the process easier with an electric beater.
I actually assumed that folding would deflate a foam more than beating rapidly.
I have also thought this
I was literally rolling on the floor laughing watching this episode. I am a pastry chef and I do feel like you were folding wrong 😂
I was always taught that you sacrifice a little of your fluffy part (like whipped cream ) to your denser product (like melted chocolate and eggs) by adding a scoop of whipped cream to the melted chocolate and mixing it in. The goal being that you are making the two products a little more similar in denseness so that when you fold them together they mix more easily and you don't have to fold as many times and therefore keep more of the volume.
But I do agree that there are times when folding seems to not really do anything.
Love your channel!!!
I came to the comments to see if anyone was criticizing his technique. I'm just a home chef, but I thought turning the bowl each fold was necessary so you don't fold in the same spot over and over, but instead incorporate the mixture evenly throughout. I thought I noticed a difference when I used this method while making japanese-style jiggly pancakes.
@@lizziemitchell7886 Exactly. Also, it is amazing how much he has somehow attained the cadence and melody of Alton Brown's style of narration.
Oh yeah! Tempering.
"I was literally rolling on the floor laughing"
No you were not.
Why do americans always say "literally" in the exact opposite way it's supposed to be used?? You most probably did not literally do that.
I’ve been wondering about this for so long! I’m writing this at the start of the video and I’m super excited to see how it goes. My thinking has always been “if the mixer can mix air into one thing, why can’t it mix air into two things while blending those things at the same time?”.
Edit: just got to the end. I KNEW IT! This just makes sense!
Btw, I REALLY love that you do videos like this where you test things and that your very anti ‘tradition for tradition’s sake’, assuming I understand you correctly. Traditions and the way humans just do things “cause it’s how it’s done” without thinking about it, is one of my biggest pet peeves.
I've been making Japanese cheesecake over Christmas and just dumping the batter into the egg foam and turning on my beater is so much more efficient than me trying to "fold" them in. I get a much better product too that's a lot fluffier than anything I had before. I can't believe I wasted so much time trying to fold my batter in.
I never went for the mixer but I never bothered with folding either. I just stir for a minute and try not to eat the whole batter before it goes in the oven. My dad insists on folding but there's never been a large enough difference between him doing the recipe vs me to start folding
Edit: and you don't have to beat the eggs before putting in the sugar either, I just do it all at once. Comes out fine
If your batter has raw flour in it, don’t consume any of it before cooking. Contrary to what most people think the dangers of eating cookie dough are, it’s much more rarely the eggs, but rather the flour that is a danger. There’s a ChubbyEmu about this as well: ua-cam.com/video/Cwa8PdtWapE/v-deo.html
i think the sugar makes it take longer
@@puellanivis That risk is still not that high of a risk for most ppl; its only a true concern for those who are at grter risk esp cuz its likely not even contaminated to begin with.
It however matters a ton in restaurants or in food manufscturin where such risks are multiplied a ton.
maybe the wisdom comes from the time before beaters?
Maybe beaters are not only great at mixing stuff together, maybe it's also great at adding air to it too and so instead of losing air by mixing u actually get more by beating.
Just spit balling.
@@puellanivis >it’s much more rarely the eggs, but rather the flour that is a danger
>links a video about an HIV positive old woman infected with salmonella from raw eggs
I trusted you
Maybe it could stem from less stable eggs? Without stabilizer as well? Or maybe hand mixing with a whisk can cause problems (if you go super super hard).
Basically if folding is true, the assumption is that there are bubbles that will pop only if force is greater than value X. So long as force is below you can mix for a long time without added popping. And to get that I would assume you'd need a more finicky foam, something you were struggling to actually get made properly before even considering mixing. If you had eggs that didn't like to make foam, or some other variable that could create the situation.
I'm thinking that the difference comes from the fact that they used to use hand whipped foams that were less stable to begin with, making it harder to keep the bubbles that you do have through a mixing process.
His foams were all made by a machine before he mixed them with other things.
@@shawnpitman876 I'd agree with this. Hand wipping eggs isn't fun. You want to bail as soon as possible. With a beater you can overshoot the minimum and get a stabler result. At least, that's my theory.
@@philipgwyn8091 It *is* fun, but it requires some muscle. Probably good for drumming. And you can get hand beaten egg white quite stable.
I guess it could be attributed to mixing it with a powered hand beater rather than mixing it in with a wooden spoon or silicon spatula. I always assumed that folding was the gentle alternative back when they didn’t have power tools, so I gave powered beating a try a couple of years ago while making Belgian waffle mix, and I also found that beating the final mix in manages to introduce the air that would have been lost if mixing in by hand
That's what I've always heard, the thick edge of a wooden spoon will absolutely knock the air out.
Also the reduced time used with a powered mixer makes up for a more violent action.
This test doesn't really work with a hand or electric whisk/mixer, because that still aerates the mixture, thereby cancelling out any deflation from more aggressive agitation. This should have been proper folding versus stirring. As in, with a wooden spoon or spatula. There, we'd really see if it makes a difference or not.
I've been doing this for decades and thought I was crazy and/or lazy. The top recipe I do this with is tiramisu and I always get compliments on how light and fluffy it is!
I think this technique would have made more sense when electric mixers didn't exist. Would be interesting to see the difference compared to whisking in the flower by hand. Maybe the extra speed the electric whisk makes a difference. Idk, all I know is that my chef yells at me when I use a whisk while making chocolate mousse.
Idea: Do it again, entirely by hand. I suspect that the power mixer is pushing air back into the foam, thus preventing loss. Many of these old rules came in the days before power tools, and if you mixed a soufle too roughly you might end up with a pancake.
Ironically, the only recipe I make that asks you to fold in egg white foam is a pancake recipe.
actually the idea of over mixing comes from the structure of the egg. it won't be able to hold the foam anymore if it's over mixed
But the point is save resources not to do it by hand right?
Diminimus is a huge part of college chemistry albeit not phrased that way. There are quantities in calculations that are so ridiculously small that you can just omit them. In buffer problems for example, we can just omit some numbers if they are to small which prevents us from having to use the quadratic formula.
lowkey offtopic but reading this comment a week after finishing my accelerated chem 2 course simultaneously made me proud that i now know exactly what you're talking about and scarred because dear lord i did more buffer problems in one week than any human should.
Yeah in Engineering we just say insignificant, or that we are neglecting something. Instead of sounding like a giant tool with a Latin phrase intended to make you sound smarter
@@crackpotfox so that's why for you guys pi=3?
It's like friction and atmosphere in physics problems
@@bigbrain296 AND g=10 lol
I really love that you're stressing the idea that sure, a lot of factors can make a difference, but often that difference is so minimal that it really isn't noticeable. I always get so annoyed when people stress over baking saying "It's a science!" Because yeah there is a scientific component to it all, but the kitchen is not a lab space and you just don't need the precision! I work in a lab now and we are always told to treat our science more like cooking, as long as you have things looking how they're supposed to at every step, it's more than likely fine!
There are sciency bits and less sciency bits. When you're looking to modify a recipe, it's important to have some sense of which are which, and what you might need to do if you're modifying something a bit sciency. If you just replace the orange juice in cranberry orange muffins with pear juice, you're not likely to get muffins; to succeed you'll need to swap out the baking soda for an appropriate amount of baking powder. If you add a whole bunch of sugar to a yeasted dough recipe without using extra yeast or special osmotolerant yeast, it's not likely to work out very well. If you try to make a random bread salt free, again, you're likely to run into some challenges.
Could this be the cream of tartar stabilizing your foam to the point where the beating it takes simply makes no difference? you aught to try just standard egg whites whipped vs tartar, it might matter with the folding then
On the other hand who doesn't use cream of tartar, lemon juice or even a little vinegar to stabilize whites? I mean everyone have these in home.
I always thought cream of tartar was for long term stability, not for resistance to mechanical agitation
Love the vid! Always nice to see old cooking myths debunked. One note about the ice bath: If I didn't visually underestimate the amount of salt you added by orders of magnitude,, the salt probably didn't do much after you added the additional water. The trick usually lies in the fact that first, you add enough salt in solutions like these to get a (close to) saturated salt solution with the melted ice and second, that the salt solution you achieve has a lower melting point than the temperature of the ice you throw in. In that scenario, the ice is 'forced' to melt and to do so, it pulls energy from the surroundings to liquify. If you add excess water, the solution is only ever gonna cool too the melting point of the solution you create (usually not far from 0°C in dilute solutions) and additionally, it may only cool via conduction (not via the 'forced' melting mechanism), defeating the point of the ice + salt method for rapid cooling of small volumina
You do know there are reasons to fold that aren't about stabilizing or destabilizing foam. Like in a baked cheesecake a lot of recipes call to fold in the ingredients in order to reduce bubbles to decrease cracking. and having baked my fair share of cheesecakes I can say it does make a difference. But yeah with foams I often just use the mixer it ends up more homogenous and the stability is fine.
To be fair, he literally asked for people to suggest circumstances where folding might be advantageous in the comments, he just hadn’t come across such a situation yet in testing.
What is the difference between destabilizing foam and reduction of bubbles?
This video is specifically about folding egg foams
I don't know what you're doing differently, but using cold cream absolutely does help it beat up better, or at least it does for me.
I've tested it both ways and, on a hot summer day, I've had cream turn halfway into butter before ever whipping up properly.
Cold cream never does that.
Yes it should be cold. Cold bowl helps if it still has trouble
Only time warm cream did that for me was when it was in the warm too long, it had turned...
to evil :)=
Really doing the work we all could do but nobody wants to. Thank you Adam!
I've been mixing (by hand) instead of folding for a little while, and never noticed a difference. But since I never ran true side by side tests, I always had doubts; thanks for yet another video that sheds light on the reasons (or lack thereof) of why we do things the way we do.
First 30 seconds and already a throw back to the Podcast... Chefs know how, not why...
I always suspected this, but never did the experiment to prove it. Thanks for the video.
Hey Adam, I have a recipe for a chocolate cheesecake which includes whipped whites, yolk and whipped cream. I notice a distinct difference if I fold lightly or combine less carefully. Interestingly I actually find that folding a bit more aggressively yields a firmer cheesecake rather than a mousey texture and I prefer that. I wonder if it's because the cheesecake is completely uncooked. I can pass one the recipe if you are interested in experimentation!
so glad Adam keeps coming up with these kitchen shortcuts for us... Answering the the questions we never knew we should've been asking.
Thanks for injecting some science into the world of cooking. I often get tired of hearing that you "have to" do something a certain way because of reasons that have never been verified.
I can't picture putting the effort in to make sure I actually would fold things like this so that's great news. My strategy of "just wing it and hope for the best" continues to sort of work!
My suspicion is that this comes from the same place that "whipping cold cream" comes from, as you mentioned. Back then, anything to make things easier was better. Back then, whipping eggs or cream until stiff peaks would have made your arms ache. To then add the other ingredients and start whipping again probably wasn't exactly something they were excited to do. So folding the stuff in was just "easier".
It'd be interesting to see an experiment to see how much harder one is over the other when doing all of the mixing/beating by hand.
in my experience, it's impossible to whip not cold cream. I tried many times, but it never worked. Do you manage to whip warm cream into hard peaks?
@@FPVkitchen it’s probably a climate thing, I’d assume warmer climates it’s harder. Do you whip by hand? Any decent hand mixer nowadays should be able to do it. But ours was broken for a while and was very weak. And we had to get everything as cold as possible for whipping.
When baking inconsistencies occur, it’s almost always climate based in my experience
@@marijnlastname3132 I did it in Russia when it was +23 celsius in the kitchen. I did use a moxer, it didn't work.
@@FPVkitchen that's really weird. Might have to do with mixer strength, or the kind of cream you use. If you haven't maybe try a different cream, or just whip it cold. If it ain't broken don't fix it
@@marijnlastname3132 All the professional French pastry chefs that I watched specifically told to use only ice-cold heavy cream. I don't see the point in changing the mixer or cream when I can simply use ice-cold cream and get the perfect result.
Your video content actually revealed the reason why folding emerged as a technique. I am referring to the passage about tempering. To prevent the risk of over-beating the mixture by using a whisk or beater, the cook switches to a spatula as a safeguard.
I watched the 'what if there's fat in the egg whites' video not long ago, and I appreciated seeing the 'wrong' outcome. It would have been interesting to see a third experimental condition showing what happens if you do get too aggressive with the power tools.
Russian way to make cake is to whip whole eggs with little vinegar, salt and sugar before adding flour with soda. It doesnt inflate much in oven and deflate to almost original volume after bakung done.
@@АкиЧуд Send recipes to Adam so he can make Russian pastry videos! Don’t make war, bake more.
FABULOUS. I have wondered this for years, but couldn't be arsed to actually try a side-by-side experiment myself. Thank you for both the answer and for saving me the trouble.
Thanks for this. I never once actually folded gently once. I’m too impatient
Me too lol
Love your videos Adam. As an engineer I appreciate your science / practicality / simplification of cooking. Also loved your bed dive.
Adam, my pastry chef instructor when i attended the Institute of Culinary Education taught us to fold certain foams using a whisk. go down the middle, turn the bowl, then scrape the side and repeat. using the whisk doesn’t deflate whatever foam and the individual legs of the whisk make it easier to cut the two (parts you’re mixing together) so that they emulsify with less effort. folding with a silicone spat is very necessary with certain recipes. i like to use a spat when folding french macaroon batter. good video!
Made that Angel Food Cake about 5 times now. Without folding!!! Everybody here loves it, thanks for that recipe. Greetings from Germany
Adam, this is exactly the kind of content that I love… rationally challenge conventional wisdom. This how is how we progress against dogma.
your're the only one i've seen to take such a scientific aproach to cooking, keep it up!
I'm interested to know whether your results would have been different had you not used cream of tartar to stabilize your egg whites.
Especially because cream of tartar isn’t usually used in baked egg white preparation since it adds unpleasant flavor. Joconde bisquite is a good example of a situation where cream of tartar just tastes acrid and distracting.
@@g33xzi11a Using a copper bowl with a tiny bit of salt creates an equivalent acid reaction that will stabilize the egg foam. The cream of tarter is a substitute if you don't have a copper bowl. And in the spirit of this video, there have been experiments on that as well.
I knew it! But never had the guts to test it. Good on you for taking the plunge!
Hey Adam, just a little question here: Would the cream of tartar be a changing factor in this experiment? You could imagine back when the whole folding thing was invented, people would be working with a less stable foam. Cheers!
This experiment is mainly, "is this practical for home chefs now" rather than when this was invented, still probably fairly accurate, just as long as it wasn't overmixed (which can be easier to achieve with folding.)
I rarely ever use cream of tartar in recipes, or any stabilizing agent. When I saw him add it, I had exactly the same thought. Does having that extra stabilization help?
I think it would be that plus when this became a thing these chefs were likely making a lot larger batches and perhaps at a larger scale it is easier to overmix if not folding.
@@BrainStewification Probably not, I find CoT only helps for long term stabilization for uncooked foams (e.g. whipped cream). If you're cooking the foam it's pointless.
You add an acid to the egg whites to neutralize some of the alkalinity. Lemon juice and vinegar work fine. I personally always use lemon juice and the meringue comes out great.
The salt+ice trick only works if you don't add water to the mix. Even then, you'd need at least 33g of salt for 100g of crushed ice and a good mixing to go down to -16°C.
"Just fold it in, David!"
-Moira Rose
Okay wth I scrolled through so many comments to find this
I would like to see a follow-up video where Adam does all the mixing by hand as I think the hand mixer incopoates more air and that's why it doesn't deflate. Where as mixing vigorously by hand would knock out more air than it puts in.
Did you place the two cakes in the oven at the same time? So one cake mixture (the first one) was sitting waiting outside while the other was being made. This means it has time to deflate at room temp for 5-10 mins before both went into the oven at the same times
IF this is the case, then maybe de minimus does not apply here as that is in my opinion a significant variable. How long the cake stands and waits outside before being put in the oven.
If the whipped whites are stabilized then 10 or even 15 minutes will not affect the volume. Leave whipped whites with cream of tartare and look for yourself how long it takes to deflate.
perfect. chance for you to reproduce the experiment
@@heksogen4788 stabilizing the whites didn’t help either angel food cake in the end- both were flat and dense. And the one that was mixed first deflated more than the one put straight in the oven after mixing.
I think I've watched one of your videos and saw you beating the mixer instead of folding. That's when I found out that folding is not necessary.
Either way, I'm very thankful for your experiments. Ty
Can't believe you've missed on "it's not rocket science, it's a piece of cake"
You, mister, just got my sub. I thought I knew this topic pretty well. For reference, I had over a dozen offers (from serious people) to open restaurants/bakeries/coffee shops after they tasted my bread/coffee/pastry/desserts/etc. And I would maybe do it if I was naive enough to think doing it for fun is the same as doing it professionally.
Anyway, waiting for some more wisdom. Keep it coming.
This was such a fascinating and ironically groundbreaking video. I always wonder what traditional cooking techniques, that have been passed down, may be groundless, or no longer serve a purpose in a modern kitchen. This is why I love your channel. I appreciate your mindfulness and skepticism. I'm excited to see more content about other potentially debatable culinary methods. Also, it would've been interesting to have had a third experiment group to test if whisking the mixtures by hand would've had no effect on the final dish. If the result is a trivial change, then it would take your conclusion a step further by essentially saying even without an electric mixer (a kitchen power tool), folding is still unnecessary.
Thank you! I have long suspected that folding was not that much gentler than careful mixing, though I have never tested it. Each stroke may be more gentle, but you need more of them. Just don't overbeat and you're good.
My impression is that cooking is filled with superstition, so we keep following old ways just because "it's the way it's always been done before".
One of my friends _insisted_ that the only way to make mayonnaise was by slowly dripping the oil, making it a long annoying procedure. He was so insistent on it that I made mayonnaise by using a regular blender and adding the oil in a thin stream. It came out perfectly in just 2-3 minutes. I threatened to make another batch with a food processor, which allows for the oil to be added in a thicker stream and be done even faster, but he relented. Thing is, I know plenty of people who add all the oil at once and get it done in just seconds with an immersion blender -- however, that method has never worked well for me, and I know that if I were willing to try many times (and ruin many batches) I'd be able to do it too, I just haven't done that yet.
In any case, decades ago, when Cook's Illustrated was a new magazine, they published an article about how folding is not necessary, just turn on the mixer on lowest speed and mix for a few seconds. I thought that was great, because that's exactly what my mom used to do. In case it matters, my mom's education was in Home Ec (she graduated in the 50's, when everything was very "sciency"), so maybe they were onto something there.
Sadly, it's decades later and Cook's Illustrated (and America's Test Kitchen) seem to have forgotten all about that article, they keep telling people to fold stuff now. Maybe they found out when/why the mixer fails and forgot to tell us, or I missed an issue or ten of their magazines. I think it's more likely all the new people they hired came straight out of cooking school and have never heard of just using the mixer and things went backwards. Oh, well.
The immersion blender mayonnaise is so easy. Just make sure the container is just barely wider than the blender. Also, add the oil to the container last so all the other ingredients sit underneath. Then just put the blender all the way to the bottom before turning it on and keep it flat against the bottom until it starts to turn into mayonnaise.
Really enjoyed this and will refer to your video from now on when I teach someone to make a soufflé. Great to take pressure off, make things easier. But for myself ... I don't use an electric beater, do my egg whites with a whisk and a copper bowl, fold with a spatula of just the resistance i like, and take pleasure in performing every step of these practiced techniques. To each her own :-) I love your experiments! Fun learning from you.
Many recipes call to incorporate one third of the whipped product to “lighten” it up, then fold in the rest. I have never found this to make any difference. You have helped reinforce my suspicions.
Ooh this is a tricky one. I would say it does in some cases. A good illustration is the souffle he made in this video. Notice how as Adam adds yolk to the chocolate mixture it breaks (fat separate from solid)? When this happens to me, I always incorporate the first third of egg white the way GR did in this video: ua-cam.com/video/2c4MewNvc5Y/v-deo.html. This serves to bring the balance of fat and liquid phase back so that they emulsify better (and somewhat lighten the mixture too). Then I incorporate the rest in - at this point Adam's conclusion comes into play so whether you whisk or fold it will come out the same.
you we're right in what you said earlier, folding ensures you dont over mix whilst maintaining the bubbles of any mixure, unfortunately its very easy to over mix with electric mixers and then you get a consistency problem when you move onto bulk/batch cooking/baking, coming from a pastry trained chef!
i do however agree that if you have some self-control when using an electric mixer and only whisk until together with smaller batches you will get the same result as folding.
Adam consistently comes out with videos showing why he is perfectly justified in being lazy in the kitchen, and I am here for it xD
I dont normally comment but im just going to go ahead and throw this one out, Adam, I love your videos. The way you mix food and cooking with science is fascinating to listen to, I always feel like I walk away having learned something new.
The beatings will continue until volume improves
possible reason for this is that before our electric hand mixers, instead of folding, you would be stirring. Using an electric hand mixer is bringing aerating the mixture in a way that you just couldn't do by hand.
I was hoping there would be macarons in the test. I think macarons are the only part I would not risk beating with handmixer.
I really enjoy your videos! Thanks to this one, I found out making ice-cream is VERY easy. I trued your method and used the mixer instead of folding in the condensed milk and it turned out wonderfully well!
You should try making the “beat” versions before the fold versions, as the longer the rest time the more air bubbles can collapse … you’ve biased the “beat” versions as they have less “hang around” time, if you still can’t see the difference you may have a point but I noticed that with the “beat” angel food cake the top surface was lower in the middle than the sides whereas the fold version was relatively flat but maybe that was just that particular cut …
I was thinking the exact same thing! Obviously for the most controlled experiment you’d want to make them at the same time, but perhaps they could be made one at a time (not baked at the same time). I’d be super curious to see if time between batter prep and bake makes a noticeable difference
It's the bread becomes rock solid after one night (if you leave under the worst possible conditions)
your conclusion has always been something I've wondered, and been skeptical about the need to fold.
I believe the concept of folding is good practice. Teaching a new baker how and why to fold teaches them the value of NOT over mixing. You even mention this concept in the experiments: "still being careful not to overdo it." It's much harder to overdo folding because it's slow and concise. It is SO MUCH easier to let a stand mixer go to town while you walk away, resulting in broken foams or tough gluten networks. And trust me when I say, people will walk away if you give them the chance. And most recipes you find online are written with these people in mind.
So yeah, absolutely if you are an experienced baker (and I don't mean only professional chefs, Adam absolutely counts as having experience) you can go with the electric mixer for the few seconds to incorporate foam. Someone who has the experience has a better understanding of consistency and the knowledge of what over mixing does. But if I were working with a fresh faced baker or even a child, I would start with folding.
Seriously, are people[i guess americans] that stupid to not see when something is incorporated properly, ie. it doesn't have streaks?
I’ve had a feeling folding was BS for a while, but didn’t have any data to back it up. Glad to see that I can use a hand mixer without worrying about it.
Your method of “fishing out the yolks” is just way too chaotic for me 😅
So funny I mixed instead of folding my egg foam yesterday and my pancakes were the same
Adam actually the master of sponsor segues.
This video was amazing. I think the folding is also to prevent gluten development, but the tests with the electric mixer didn’t seem to have a more glutinous crumb. I’d be interested in seeing a follow-up video on how much mixing is “too much” for cakes/brownies.
Edit: grammar
The larger bubbles in the angle food that was mixed are because of over mixing, makes it look and feel like worms dug through it
I think that when you have relatively little flour (compared to something like a bread dough) and you only mix it for a short time, just enough to get the batter homogeneous, there's little risk of developing too much gluten. It takes quite a lot of work to get good gluten going.
This channel is so good, I love food science
I've wondered this too! Thanks for approaching this, Adam. I've noticed that on occasions when I make macarons the mixture does not always loosen up as much as is recommended during the 'macronage' process. I have, at times, taken a wooden spoon to the mixture and stirred it as fast as I can until it develops that sought-after lava consistency, and the macarons turn-out perfectly each time. All the online guides (except your brilliantly relaxed recipe :-p ) strongly advise to carefully fold the mixture to keep as much air in as possible. It got me thinking how much use the folding process was.
It's been years that I doubted the effectiveness of "Folding" and not being very "professional" sometimes I felt my "folding" was crushing the foam too much. So... I didn't go all the way to mixing with power tool, but Instead I invented my own "Folding" done not with a spatula or flat spoon - but rather with a Whisk! same movements + rotating the whisk a little did wonderful job. It never "fell" in volume, it merged 3 times faster than folding, and it was not violent at all, so I felt I didn't change from the recommended "delicate handling" of the process. Adam, try this next time. It may be preferable to both "ends" of your test case "Folding" and "Power mixing". Of course I didn't experiment like you did - as No one pays me to do that, but after doing these experiments, you may appreciate my point here.
Thanks anyway, next time we're in a hurry we'll know there is no problem with just mixing. Also - it may allow you to save a dish - if you have either your foam (whipped cream, merengue or other) or the other liquid (fatty or not) in the Mixer's bowl - you could simply pour the other in, and continue with the mixer and its "guitar" head. would be both faster, more efficient - and now we know - should also work fine.
What if you made the meringue without cream of tartar? is it possible the cream of tartar is stabilizing the mixture to the point folding and mixing are the same?
Wondering the same thing, if the discovery that cream of tartar stabilizes egg foams happened after the folding technique was developed.
It doesn’t work in stabilizing it from losing air, but it has more to do when the actual structure forms from the protein keeping it smooth.
I agree with the home cook argument.. honestly I have years worth of experience in very detail oriented cooking and I can tell you that the way you used different techniques for your experiement doesn't allow me or professional cooks to make any conclusion about the topic. many times it's not only a matter of deflating but having control over the consistency (for example macarons)