Cut Your Butter Like A Baker With One Tool

Cutting your butter may sound like a pretty basic task when throwing a pat into a pan or spreading it on toast, but the way you cut your butter can make all the difference in baking. This is particularly true when tackling a baking project like buttery biscuits or pie crust. The way you cut your butter can be the key difference between light, flakey layers and a dense, chewy brick.

You can't just cut your butter with a regular knife and call it a day. Well, you probably can, but if you want to ensure bakery-level precision, you'll want to start cutting your butter with a bench scraper. Much more than a tool to clean up your cutting board, a bench scraper helps you cut cold butter into clean, equal pieces with its flat edge, which can then be broken up into your flour for the best pastry dough.

If you're not baking-inclined, a bench scraper is a thin piece of metal with a handle and a blunt edge that's typically used to scrape pastry off your counter or cutting board. The broad, flat edge also helps chefs scoop up things like chopped veggies and such while cooking.

Though the edge of the blade is very dull, it still does good work cutting something like butter for baking projects. With a straight blade like the one on a bench scraper, you just need to apply some pressure to slice cleanly through your butter and turn it into small pieces. From there, you can add them to the flour and crumble them with your fingers until they're the size of frozen peas for premier pastry and biscuit dough. The small pieces of butter melt in the oven and the water inside turns to steam, lifting your dough as it bakes which creates those flakey layers that drive everyone wild.

This use for your bench scraper also helps you avoid nicking yourself with a knife since the blade is way too blunt to cut skin, but the wide edge still makes it easy to cut through butter, even when frozen. Now all you have to do is make sure you're buying the right kind of butter for the job. If you like Irish butter, Aldi has a Kerrygold copycat for cheap.