Pastry chef Claire Saffitz is back at it again with some intense dedication to extremely detailed junk food recreation.
On this episode of the YouTube series Gourmet Makes from Bon Appétit, Saffitz takes on the classic cheesy snack — Cheez-It. She can tell from the beginning that they will have to be baked, and sets out on a quest to get that iconic texture just right.
To get those very crispy layers, she uses a technique called "lamination" with butter, which produces a flakiness similar to the layers of a croissant.
However, it's a struggle. Several people assist her in the math portion of calculating what size the dough will bake to and how much it shrinks in the oven. "How many college degrees did that take?" she remarks.
The next three batches fail to achieve the perfect texture using yeast, and she gets increasingly frustrated. When she decides to make it more like a pie dough, the results speak for themselves.
