Welcome to the very first post of the greedy pi, my new blog about food, cooking, drinking and just having a good time. I don't know why it's taken me so long to do this considering I waste so much time looking at so many other food related blogs I should have just started one of my own.
Anyway as some of you may know, I managed to figure out how to make those crazy macarons that are perhaps the synthesis of what a cookie can be. Ethereal, full of flavor, fun in size, colors, light, chewy and so ever sophisticated as we see from those professionally done.
Fall has just arrived in Pullman with the leaves turning yellow and some already a bright blush red. The sun is however, sadly fading more and more and an increasing number of layers of clothes are being added when walking outside. It does give an excuse to start doing more fall related cooking be it a few more braises and stews then normal.
But I stray from the focus of the post.
When I first tried making macarons a number of years ago I had no idea what I was doing. Thinking back hard on it I think I still didn't know what a real meringue should have been. Now I love the idea of whipping those egg whites to a exponential volume in something that is glossy and full of potential whether its making cakes lighter, a souffle of some sort or for macarons. The basic recipe for these macarons I used from Annie's Eats which is one of the more simpler recipes out there that uses the French meringue technique as opposed to the complicated Italian meringue involving a sugar syrup and one step too many.
It also gave the ingredients in weight - something which I feel is a big problem in baking and too an extent, cooking. If you want to bake accurately and many people to consider some sort of science, a weighing scale that can ideally go to the individual gram makes things much easier to work with. Not only do you lose the ambiguity of "1 cup of butter" (honestly I dont know how I can measure a cup of butter) but clean up is also easier in that all the ingredients can be placed in one main bowl and things are just tarred back to zero and continued on.
Moving on to the recipe itself, there are a number of points on macarons which must be addressed in order to achieve the glossy shiny smooth exterior, some sort of feet and a cookie shell that over time starts to soften and is not hard or hollowed.
Meringue: prior to some popular belief, I've discovered thanks to brave tart, you don't need to age the egg whites. However the egg whites ARE the first thing I take out of the fridge, separate and let to sit at room temperature before I get on with the rest of the ingredients and what not. Some add salt or cream of tartar though I've yet to do this although. More sugar in the meringue means generally a stiffer more stable meringue also (or so I've been told). So what i've done to reduce the sweetness of some of my macs have been to cut down on the icing sugar used in the other portion but increased the sugar in the meringue. I think this technique worked in the humid environment of Singapore but isn't really needed over here in Pullman where its relatively dry.
Macaronage: Ahh yes, the ever terrifying macaronage - one stroke too many and its a wasted batter which will not rise nor give you any feet. A stroke too little and you basically end up with meringue and not macaron batter. This is the hardest part of macron making to explain but the basic idea is to end up with a batter that will flow slowly out of your piping bag just from gravity but a batter that is also not so 'loose' that it doesn't retain some sort of round-ish shape. Many describe the batter that it should flow like magma. Considering i dont really know what that looks like in real life, i prefer the method where you take some batter and make streaks of it with your spatula - the batter should fall back into the batter in about 15 or so seconds.
Drying: So I did a test where I popped the macs in straight into the oven without leaving it out to dry
and the macarons cracked and didnt even rise. From what I can tell, the drying process creates a skin around the macarons so that the hot air pushes downwards into creating the feet and thus prevents them also from cracking. As such I leave my macarons out to dry for about an hour and a half or so, or until it is completely dry to the touch.
Banging: Once you pipe the macarons don't forge to bang it down on the counter top or table. What I also do is slap the baking tray from the bottom to pop any air bubbles that may be present which will make your macarons crack.
Oven temp: This is more of a trial or error thing. The first macs I made came out at 300F or 150C. Back in Singapore I had to dial it down to about 125C or so. In this oven I'm using right now it hovers about 275F or so. Do a test run, cut a piece of baking paper and pipe a lone macaron on it and test between the oven temperatures, saves you a ton of either over baked, under baked or burnt macarons.
So onto the recipe. Thanks to the fact that the ingredients are by weight, you can pretty much figure out the ratio of recipe. Egg whites are the 'hardest' to measure out so I take the weight of the whites of 3 eggs and then adjust to it. Some math may be involved but it makes it more fun.
Since that's the case, the following recipe is for the macs i just made, but go to the link from above and you can find the original recipe
Cocoa tinged roasted pumpkin 'pie' macarons with Pâte à Bombe
Makes about two dozen sandwiched cookies depending on how big you pipe them – these are piped about 1 inch in diameter.
For the shells:
92g Egg whites (These are about 3 “large” American eggs. Make sure there is absolutely no yolks in it and its not contaminated or else your meringue will be sad and never occur)
101.2g Almond flour/meal (go ahead and grind your own if you want too/can, just make sure its as fine as possible)
184g Icing/confectionary Sugar (I’ve heard of variations between powdered sugar with starch in them. I’ve yet to face this problem, but then again, I’ve never took noticed. From what I’ve read, this doesn’t really matter whether there’s starch or not.)
46g Granulated sugar
4g Cocoa powder
Start with the egg whites – take your eggs out of the fridge and separate the yolks from the whites. Put the whites in to a CLEAN METALLIC (or glass or ceramic, NOT plastic) bowl. Save the yolks for later (this you can put in whatever container you want. Plastic sometimes retains fat in it which will prevent any meringue from happening.
Sift your almond flour/meal, ICING sugar and cocoa powder in a separate bowl (of whatever material, just make sure its dry). What I do is take two large bowls (small bowls = messy counter top) and sift everything in one bowl and sift again into the other bowl. Get it? Just make sure everything is well combined and sifted.
OK, so once you’ve sifted everything, line a heavy baking pan (ideally, if your pan is thin like mine, use double layer the pans when baking the shells) with non-stick parchment paper, cut to fit whatever size it is. Try to keep it as flat as possible, trust me, paper sticking out is a pain. If you can, a silicon baking mat works extremely well and is reusable.
Prepare your piping bag. I use a 14” piping bag with a round tip of about 0.25cm. I think its Ateco number #11or #9. I like to put the piping bag inside a big tall glass or vase as its easier to fill especially if you don’t have anyone to help you.
Now start whisking your egg whites. If your lucky, you’ll be using a stand mixer of some sort (I just realized that some stand mixers have plastic bowls, so CLEAN these bowls as much as possible), if not I have made macarons using a hand mixer before, so that works fine, just a little more of a pain. Start on a slow speed for about 3 mins, adding 1/3 of the granulated sugar (just estimate, the idea is to not add all of it at the same time so the meringue doesn’t collapse on any weight). After 3 mins, up the speed to medium (about a 6-7 on a kitchen aid), add another 1/3 of the sugar. After 3 mins again, turn it up to high and add the last bit of sugar. Right now your meringue should start looking darn glossy or if not, soon to be. If not you screwed up somewhere with probably a bit of fat contamination. You know your meringue is done when it looks like glossy shaving cream and it can stand on itself, meaning, its somewhat solid. If you tip your bowl upside down, it shouldn’t fall out. Really. Try it. I dare you. (It’s never fallen on me, honest).
So this is the hard part: Macronage. Pour 1/3 of your thoroughly mixed and sifted almond/icing sugar mixture and start folding with a rubber spatula. The bigger the spatula the easier I’ve found this to be. What you wanna do is (I’m right handed) run the spatula along the edges of the bowl about ¾ of the way, and then fold the entire thing over onto the middle. Rotate the bowl a little (just keep going in one direction, so if you rotate left, keep going left), and run the spatula along the edge and fold over again. If it’s easier, look up youtube videos for how to fold stuff, or just look up folding macarons or something like that. Anyway, the idea is that we want to fold to just the right amount and so you fold until just a few streaks of the almond/sugar mixture is left then you add in the next 1/3, keep going at it and then again with the rest of the mixture. The picture below is when I was making Kaya macarons which had green coloring. If your using coloring, add it in AFTER its nice and glossy.
So this is when you want to be really careful. Your mixture shouldn’t have any streaks left of unfolded/mixed flour/icing sugar because it will mess with the entire structure of the cookie and bad things can happen if it is not integrated into the batter. So to test for whether the batter is folded enough, make some streaks of the batter and if it sinks back into it so that it looks like there wasn’t any streaks in the first place after about 20 seconds or so, your good to go. Another test is to take about a teaspoon of it, place a blob on a small plate and invert the plate vertically so that the streak should run down the plate just nicely so that it stops after a bit and doesn’t run off the plate.
Er, if it runs of the plate, you’ve gone too far. If the streaks disappear in like, 2 secs, you’ve gone to far. If it looks water and won’t hold a shape when you pipe it… well you get my drift. However, if it just kinda clumps there and the streak doesn’t disappear, give it another couple of folds. If it doesn’t even run on the plate, give it more folds.
So take your piping bag and fill it. Your batter should run out just slightly, not so much that there’s a mess on the kitchen floor – you’ve gone too far or you’re just careless. Pipe your macarons about an inch in diameter, making them as big or as small as you like. Careful about the ones at the edges though, the batter will spread just slightly and also during baking, so make sure to leave about a cm or so between each cookie and the edges of your baking tray. Once you’ve finished piping, get your baking tray and bang the crap out of it on your counter top/table or smack it underneath to get rid of all your air bubbles. The macarons should spread out a little more once again after the banging/smacking.
Once your done with the physical contact, let your shells dry out for about an hour or so. I’ve been told that if you don’t over mix your batter you can skip this step – I’m a little skeptical about this so I just let them dry. If it’s a humid day or area, it might take 2 hrs. The tops should be dry and feel like they have a ‘skin’ around them.
Bake your macarons for 14 mins (if you piped them the inch like I said so). Obviously if their smaller then don’t bake them for such a long time. At about the 5 min mark, you can tell if your macarons are coming out right or not, for this is about the time when the feet come along. If there’s no feet and the macaron collapsed/didn’t rise or doesn’t look like macarons… er, you’ve done something wrong. The cookies that come out are still good eating, but macarons they are not. Never mind, just tell people you made almond cookies.
You can tell their done if you take them out of the oven for about a couple of mins. If you can peel them off the parchment/silicon mat their done. If they still stick, put them back in for a little longer, though mind you, further cooling will make it easier.
Your shells can be kept in the freezer for some time, I hear about up to a month (I’ve never done it though). I suggest a hard container btw, if you don’t want to crush em’.
Pate a Bombe/French Buttercream:
I used the recipe adapted from “Professional Baking”, since I had 3 yolks I scaled down the numbers. Yeah, do the math.
Follow the instructions as the site says. However I did do this using a hand mixer since the stand mixer (kitchen aid) I have is way to big for such a small scale. Also I don’t have a candy thermometer but a meat/probe one so I let my sugar syrup go up to 120C on my readings. The syrup itself should look clear and colorless but have large bubbles bubbling around it and furiously also. If it looks dark/amber/golden you’ve gone too far.
Another way to test the syrup is the soft ball stage test. Get a spoon and flick some of the syrup into a bowl/vessel of cold water. The syrup should instantly ‘solidify’ due to the cold and you should be able to roll essentially a soft ball of sugar syrup around your fingers. Google it for pics.
The end result should be very much like a very, very thick honey, with a very creamy yellow color. And sticky as heck.
Roasted Pumpkin:
I used half a butternut squash (their still pumpkins right?), cut them in chunks and roasted them at 350F for like… I don’t even know… until they were soft. By this time their ‘skin’ had kinda hardened (dried out I guess) so I just cut them open and scooped out the steaming flesh. I was worried about the moisture content however so I cooked the flesh on the stove top, continuously stirring for about 10 mins. If you put a small amount of the squash with the pate a bombe and you feel its ok for a filling (not too wet, not too dry), your good to go.
Assembly:
Mix about a 1:1 ratio of roasted squash/pumpkin with the pate a bome. Add in as much cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice or your favorite flavoring.
Pipe filling onto one macaron and top with its hopefully, identical brother/sister macaron.
Store in the fridge for about 4-5 hrs before eating, what this does is allow the shell to soften ever so slightly by the filling and basically makes the cookie a singular tasty entity. Trust me, this step shouldn’t be ignored.
Congratulations, you’ve made macarons!
Couple of pointers:
- · If you omit the cocoa powder the macarons will come out white – add whatever coloring you like but you need to experiment with different types of coloring and their brands. Some are more liquidy then others so you can only use less (color isn’t so intense). You add the coloring at the end of the meringue process, as in once its nice and stiff and glossy (stop the machine/whipping, add your coloring and start whipping again on high).
- · Pate a bombe can be flavored with whatever you like, experiment.
- · If you use a wet filling such as a jam, you might not need to let your macarons sit for those 4-5 hours and just eat them an hr or so.
- · Don’t be surprised if you fail the first 5-6 times, I did.
- · Don’t use my recipe and expect it to be fool proof, it’s still under works and I still mess up every now and then.
- Case in point, if you can tell in my photos, the last few ones which are these pumpkin filled macarons have very different looking 'feet' then the other pictures of previously made macarons. I think this is due to oven and thus temperature differiences which i still need to figure out although I don't mind them looking like this.
- Oh and one last thing, if your oven is the type with the fan, turn the fan off since it makes the oven hotter then it really needs to be.
- Good luck!
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