Prue Leith

Prue’s Handy Hack: How to Master the Art of Folding

Appears in
Life's Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom
Life's Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom

By Prue Leith

Published 2024

  • About
Folding is very different from mixing, whisking or beating. All of these just require various degrees of energy in bashing ingredients together. But folding is combining foods in such a way that you lose minimum air from the mixture, to keep it light and airy. It is an art worth learning. If you have painstakingly whisked air into the base mixture, you don’t want to knock it out.
  • Folding flour into cake batter: In this case it’s a good idea to sift a quarter or half of the flour at a time over the top of the batter and then fold each batch in as described below, rather than dumping in all the flour in a single dose, which will likely lead to lumps.
  • Folding together similar textures: If you are folding mixtures of similar texture together, one of them (such as heavier melted chocolate mixed into cream, or the unwhisked mango purée in our mango ice cream) will want to sink to the bottom when you pour it in. So, folding correctly is important to ensure the mixtures become fully combined, without unmixed patches.