I have to admit, I was going to skip this month’s challenge. I have so many excuses, “I’ve done them so many times”, “I don’t have all the ingredients”, “I don’t have the time”, “I don’t want to”, etc…After seeing that several of my macaron posts were referenced in the most recent challenge, I felt like a goat for not at least trying this one out. It’s three days after the challenge was supposed to be posted, but here goes…

I just so happened to have the makings of macarons already in my pantry, albeit with my not-so-favorite, unblanched, skin-on, almond meal from Trader Joes. This stuff works fine but the specks both me; it’s all I had on hand so please excuse the mess. The other ingredients, the sugars and the eggs, are things that I always seem to have on hand; it looks as if one of my excuses was a lie.

The recipe, as it so happens, isn’t all that different from past efforts: (Forgive me as I hack it up here)

Ingredients
Confectioners’ (Icing) sugar: 2 ¼ cups (225 g, 8 oz.)
Almond flour: 2 cups (190 g, 6.7 oz.)
Granulated sugar: 2 tablespoons (25 g , .88 oz.)
Egg whites: 5 (Have at room temperature)

I took the liberty of halving this recipe, just in case things went south with the method, the recipe, or my lack of practice. The big difference in this recipe is the lower amount of granulated sugar in the the meringue. I’m sure this will affect the sweetness as well as the difficulty of incorporating the egg white mixture with the dry goods. A stiffer, more sugary meringue will be a bit more forgiving, but alas, I gave it a go.

The general method of combining wet and dry ingredients is pretty much the same: incorporate the dry into the wet in three separate additions, make sure the ingredients are fully incorporated yet don’t completely destroy the meringue in the process. There’s also a hairy little secret most people don’t divulge: if you don’t mix enough, you get meringue cookies instead of macarons. Most of us have the opposite problem of overmixing the batter and getting wonderful, cracked, exploding macarons that break your will, yet we go back into the kitchen for another beating

The cooking of these macarons is where things get a bit interesting. Instead of allowing the macarons to dry at room temperature on the counter, the recipe has them cooked at a low temperature to dry them out first, then they are completed at a much higher temperature.

Preheat the oven to 200°F (93°C).

Bake the macaroon for 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and raise the temperature to 375°F (190°C). Once the oven is up to temperature, put the pans back in the oven and bake for an additional 7 to 8 minutes, or lightly colored.

I’m a bit weary of this step but it could prove useful in speeding up production. Even when I made them in a restaurant kitchen with a fancy-shmancy convection oven, we always let them dry for hours before we baked them off. This high cooking temperature runs the risk of browning the macarons if they aren’t watched carefully.

Even with my doubts, I got the feet. They weren’t as pronounced as previous efforts, but they did come out. As expected, though, the macarons browned a little bit while waiting for them to be fully cooked. Even with about five extra minutes of cooking, I don’t feel like these baked as well as they do at a much lower temperature. The skin on the top of the macarons is so unbelievably thin that, even carefully taking them off the silpat, they cracked.

Yet another macaron recipe that works but not quite good enough, for me, to switch from my most recent efforts. I was happy to see them come together and form, and that, for most of us, is good enough.

My past attempts at the perfect macaron have not all been met with success. Many of these cookies have suffered the fate of the trash can with their cracked shells and hollow centers. I’ve tried many online recipes and even tried going back to an original recipe I used back in my pastry chef days but all of them have yielded spotty results. In my vast online research I’ve been unable to find a consistent go-to recipe that works for most people. With frustration setting in, the eater has come to the recipe with a few reinforcements; French Macaron cookbooks.

Let me start with this disclaimer: I do not speak, read, or even really understand French. I’ve never been to France. I’ve never taken a French class. The closest to France I’ve ever been is Montreal where they speak French, but I still didn’t understand what people were saying. The cookbook I tried out was 30 Recette de Macarons; I’m pretty sure that means 30 recipes for Macarons.

This book is all macarons, all the time. It starts out with a two page primer on the correct way to make macarons and some pictures…at least that’s what I imagine it says. The following pages all follow a pattern: recipe on left page, picture of a macaron creation on right page. The recipes are all quite short and contain the macaron and the filling. With a little bit of help from google I picked out a macaron recipe to try out. The recipe went something like this:

100g almond powder
100g confectioners sugar
100g granulated sugar
100g (3) egg whites

There was a whole bunch of French directions that I glazed over after I saw the ingredients and, I confess, skipped one-hundred percent. I know I could have spent time typing everything into google to get a pretty bad usable translation of the recipe, but I was too excited about the new book, the simplicity of the recipe, and the excitement of trying yet another macaron recipe.

My haste, this time, did not produce any waste. My original method of making macarons, using the ingredient break-down listed, produced an almost perfect macaron. There were a few things I did pull out of the book while waiting for the little shells to dry out though:

The shells were a little bit larger than I normally make them
I cooked these at 320F.
I double-panned them while cooking.

As you can see, filled with a nice chocolate ganache, these macarons came out nicely. This recipe seemed to work, was easy to remember, and didn’t deviate from the techniques I’ve already learned. I think this book may be a keeper!

Macarons and foodbloggers go hand-in-hand. There’s something about these little cookie sandwiches that captures our imaginations and urges us to create new and exciting flavors. I think everyone that makes macarons gets caught up in the excitement and is ultimately consumed by these treats. I, for one, have been consumed by trying to make the best macaron I can.

Macarons are a tricky thing to master. They only require a few simple ingredients: sugar, almonds, and eggs, yet time after time the one ingredient that always seems to get added is failure. The techniques aren’t complicated yet once they are all put together, you are only afforded the smallest of miscalculations. Grind almonds with sugar, make a soft-peak meringue, fold, pipe, and bake. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

About a year ago I thought I finally found a foolproof recipe. I tested and retested and everything seemed to work out just fine. I was even ok with a slightly sweeter product as long as it produced consistent results, but again I was wrong. I tried out my foolproof recipe a few weeks back and found out that it, too, was flawed. My macarons looked to have come out beautifully but upon further review, the shells were crisp, hard, and brittle: it was back to the drawing board.

Checking my RSS, I saw that Veronica had a similar sucre-cuit recipe. This recipe was from a macaron master, Pierre Herme, how could it go wrong?! So I gathered my ingredients, assembled my equipment, and followed the recipe exactly. There were no surprises in this macaron recipe: cooked sugar syrup is added to whipped egg whites to create an Italian meringue, almonds and sugar is ground and sifted, everything is folded together, and finally piped to size. I was excited to see them dry out and even more excited to see them cook up so nicely. Only one or two cracked and the rest came out looking great. That’s where the success ended.

Once again, my perfect looking macarons came out hard and brittle. These more closely resembled meringue cookies than macarons. I soldiered on, filled the cookies, and hoped a short stay in the refrigerator would soften them but I was wrong, again. As much as it broke my heart, yet another batch of macaron made a trip to the trash, they were still beautiful though.

After this round of failure, I needed to prop my ego up a little bit so I picked a tried-and-true recipe from Helen the macaron veteran. Her recipe, lately, has worked great for me; this time was no exception. I was able to put together the entire recipe quickly, have everything piped out and dried, cooked, filled, and assembled in no time. Again, there was minimal cracking and the feet came out excellently. I think I have a go-to recipe now. I will still play with my own recipes, foolishly, but this recipe is a winner and I will keep coming back to it.

Finally success! Jef – 1 Macaron – 1 (I had to reset the score to make it fair)

Blah

I admit, macaron madness has fully infected the foodgeek household. I must have made at least 7 batches of macarons trying to get a recipe to come out. I’d have entire pans of cracked cookies, pans that only half of them cracked, and others that were perfect.

What did I learn from all of this?

• Do not fold the ingredients like you would a cake. The batter needs to be deflated a good deal to get that ‘flows like magma’ consistency.
• Drying the macarons out before they are cooked provides insurance. While it may not be necessary, I found that the dried batches I made almost never cracked and always formed a proper foot.
• I tried several oven temperatures, for the most part, they all worked. I settled on 335°F because it was what worked the best in the end
• If you add coloring, do so to the egg whites at the end of beating and before folding in the dry ingredients.

With all of the mistakes I made, there was a good deal of success. At the end of all of my experiments, I was able to produce four sheets of uncracked macarons. With those four sheets, I managed to come up with four separate flavors: chocolate, lemon, raspberry, and banana caramel.

This recipe has evolved a little bit, here’s what I’m using now:

Basic Macaron Batter

65g almond powder
85g powdered sugar
2 egg whites
30g granulated sugar

Preheat oven to 335°F

Place almond powder and powdered sugar in a food processor. Process with metal blade until thoroughly combined.

Beat whites in a bowl with an electric mixer at high speed. As the whites begin to foam, add sugar in a slow stream while mixing. Continue mixing at high speed until whites reach stiff peaks.

Fold almond mixture into egg whites in two additions. The mixture will deflate quite a bit. Continue folding until mixture is fully combined and shiny. (and flows like MAGMA)

Immediately fill a pastry bag fitted with an 11mm round tip and pipe into rounds onto a baking sheet lined with a silpat baking mat.

Rap the baking sheet a few times firmly on the countertop to flatten the macaron.

Leave macarons out to dry for about 30 minutes or until they do not stick to your finger when touched.

When macarons are sufficiently dry, place in the oven to bake. After about five minutes, a ruffled skirt should develop around the bottom edge of each macaron. Rotate the baking sheet by 180 degrees, and bake for another five to seven minutes.

Check to see if macarons are done by grabbing the top of one macaron and trying to shake it. They are done when the top barely slides against the skirt. If they are not done, extend baking time by two minutes intervals, checking after each extension.

Move silpat to a cooling rack. After macarons have cooled enough to touch, remove them from silpat and place upside down on rack. If they do not easily come off silpat, place in freezer for a few minutes and try again.

First off we’ll start with my basic Macaron Batter.

115g almond powder

140g powdered sugar
90g egg whites
60g granulated sugar

I have been using this as the basis for all of my flavors. Checking various recipes over the web and scaling it appropriately, it seems like my recipe is a bit off which could be a problem. I seem to have less eggs and less powdered sugar than most other recipes. Here’s what I believe the recipe should look like:

100g almond powder
200g powdered sugar
120g egg whites (4)
65g powdered sugar

If you would like, you can easily add a few grams of flavoring, chocolate, matcha, rosewater, etc, and everything should work out fine in the end. To make pretty colors I use liquid food coloring.

Assembling the ingredients isn’t very hard. I usually take the almond powder and the powdered sugar and blend them in a food processor; you can also pass them both through a fine mesh drum sifter. I then make the meringue in my stand mixer. The dried goods are then incorporated into the meringue. Sounds easy, right? Here’s where the problems begin.

It is the process of mixing the almond mixture into the meringue is called “macaronage”

Clement over at A La Cuisine has a good write-up on the correct way to achieve macaronage:

The secret to making good macarons is to stir the batter to just the right consistency. Stir too little, and your macarons won’t have feet and will have a peak on their tops. But stir too much, and you’ll end up with flat, cracked, tough and chewy macarons. The best way to check for the correct consistency is to test if peaks in the batter quickly dissolve. I’ve also read that the batter should be mixed just until it ‘flows like magma.’ After the macarons have been piped, it’s important to let them rest until they’ve formed a skin.

Here is what happens when you screw up macaronage:

Apparently I did not mix to the ‘flows like magma’ stage. The feet are non-existent, the tops cracked, and some are hollow. Next time I will make sure to use the best method for checking consistency as listed above.

Even our buddy David Lebovitz had his problems (forgive me while I try not to giggle) getting the correct foot and rise. While his note that true macarons could only be made in France is a load of crap, he did have an interesting discovery: You don’t have to let your macarons sit for hours, just pipe, whack them on the counter, and bake.

One last interesting point to mention is baking temperature. It seems like everyone likes to bake their macarons at a different temperature, too:

Foodgeek 305F
David Lebovitz 375F
Clement 325F (with a spoon in the door!)
Lynn 350F (300F in a convection oven)

I’ve looked at pictures of the final results and they all appear to be identical. I’m not sure why these vary so much but my best suggestion is to experiment a little and use what works for you.

So after much research, I have some new things to try. A new recipe, a few checks to make sure I achieve proper macaronage, no drying, and a new baking temperature. I don’t usually like changing so many things at once, but I’m going to go ahead and do it this one time. I’ll keep you guys updated with my research.

Such a fitting start, the beautiful French macaron: two smooth and delicate meringue-like rounds flavored however the chef pleases, usually made in some beautiful pastel color that reflects the flavor, and sandwiched with some wonderful, complementary flavored filling between. They are generally made either as standard three inch rounds or small one inch miniatures.

He has made them in raspberry, blackberry, pistachio, chocolate, and orange with various fruit or chocolate fillings. They are always sublime creations that disappear quickly. The outside of the pastry has a slight crispness to it, and a slightly soft moistness inside with the center filling always an irresistible match.

His latest creation is a very Japanese take on the macaron, a green tea, or matcha, flavored pastry with red bean paste, or an, filling.

Matcha Macaron
110g almond powder
140g powdered sugar
7g matcha (powdered green tea)
90g egg whites
60g granulated sugar
Enough red bean paste to fill about five dozen miniature macarons

Preheat oven to 305°F

Place almond powder, powdered sugar, and matcha in a food processor. Process with metal blade until thoroughly combined.

Beat whites in a bowl with an electric mixer at high speed. As the whites begin to foam, add sugar in a slow stream while mixing. Continue mixing at high speed until whites reach stiff peaks.

Fold almond mixture into egg whites in three additions. The mixture will deflate quite a bit. Continue folding until mixture is fully combined and shiny.

Immediately fill a pastry bag fitted with a 11mm round tip and pipe into rounds onto a baking sheet lined with a silpat baking mat.

Leave macarons out to dry for about 30 minutes or until they do not stick to your finger when touched.

When macarons are sufficiently dry, place in the oven to bake. After about five minutes, a ruffled skirt should develop around the bottom edge of each macaron. Rotate the baking sheet by 180 degrees, and bake for another five to seven minutes.\

Check to see if macarons are done by grabbing the top of one macaron and trying to shake it. They are done when the top barely slides against the skirt. If they are not done, extend baking time by two minutes intervals, checking after each extension.

Move silpat to a cooling rack. After macarons have cooled enough to touch, remove them from silpat and place upside down on rack.If they do not easily come off silpat, place in freezer for a few minutes and try again.

Sandwich macarons together with smooth red bean paste.

Keep macarons in the freezer and serve chilled. Macarons are best the day after baking, giving them time to dry out a bit.

Makes about five dozen macarons.

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