Making French Macarons

Recently I’ve had the overwhelming urge to bake something “fancy”.  I guess fancy is a relative term.  Essentially I wanted to bake something beyond the usual cookies and banana bread… something I might actually venture out of my house to buy.  I turned to for inspiration as it contains tons of recipes with accompanying gorgeous photos.  I looked at pies, tarts, layered cakes, loaf cakes, rolls, cookies etc. until I stumbled across her macaron recipe.  I remembered this recipe. Years ago Martha had been on the Today Show making them and I had printed off the recipe.  Macarons it was!

I was going to go with Martha’s recipe but then I decided to do some research into other recipes and technique.  Holy jeez are there a lot of blog posts about Macarons out there.  I’ll post a list of useful links at the end of this post.  Everyone has a story to tell about their macaron making, everyone has a few horror stories… but it’s all really interesting to read.  I had this romanticized idea of making one of Pierre Herme’s macaron recipes. While in Paris I fell in love with Pierre Herme’s macarons. I knew he had a book and figured some recipes would make it to the interwebs.  Most of the recipes I found were his more inventive flavours but my heart really wanted Hazelnut.  I ended up gravitating to this recipe from Food, Je T’aime.The recipe seemed easy enough and the directions were fairly clear.  Well except for the ganache.  The blogger doesn’t tell you how much chocolate or cream to use in the ganache… it worked out in the end.

In my research there are a few things that I learned that I think are pivotal to macaron success:

1. Buy a scale:  Everyone always talks about how precise measurements in baking have to be.  I think there is nothing truer than with macaron making.  Sure, some recipes give you volume-based measurements but I didn’t quite trust them.  So I went out and bought a digital kitchen scale.  I paid about $20 for it and am in love.  It really highlights how not precise volume-based measurements can be.

2. Age your egg whites: Some recipes tell you to do this but others trick you into thinking that you can make great macarons with eggs that have just be brought to room temperature.  Aging egg whites involves separating the eggs and keeping them either on the counter or in the fridge for a few days.  Apparently this helps beat more air into the whites.  It also means that you can’t really make macarons on a whim.  For the record I used frozen egg whites that I had on hand from a previous yolk-based endeavour.  I asked David Lebovitz if that was okay via Twitter and he said yes. With his blessing I went forth.

3. Process your almonds fine and then process them some more: I was able to find ground almonds in my bulk store but I had to grind them a bit more in the food processor.  In retrospect I could have processed them even longer.  The finer the consistency the smoother your macarons will be.  Not sure if this affects the physics of the macarons but it is better for appearance and mouth-feel.

4. Pipe properly: you want an even disk without any peaks on top.  You also want to pipe them as close to a circle as possible, an oddly shaped macaron cannot be fixed once they are baked.

There are probably a gazillion more tips but these are the ones that directly had an impact on my experience.

Of course the road to macaron making wasn’t totally smooth.  My first batch turned out wonky (see above).  It was my fault.  I realized that I had never used a pastry bag before.  I got thrown off by the whole piping thing.  I for some reason got into the habit of piping snail shaped coils.  Needless to say they didn’t turn out properly.  The did taste DELICIOUS though.

Then I realized that I could just pipe out circular blobs and they would work out just fine. My blobs were a bit too high I think so I ended up with big “feet” and a high air pocket at the top.  I’m thinking next time I should whack the baking sheet against the counter before baking to reduce some of the air pockets… although I’m not sure if that would help.  Part me thinks i just used to much batter.  And speaking of batter I find it very unhelpful that many recipes suggest mixing the egg whites and flour until it’s the consistency of magma.  Seriously guys, MAGMA??  I have never seen magma in my life.

The final results were great.  A bit on the sweet side but that’s easy enough to rectify.  Contrary to popular belief macaron-making isn’t that difficult.  I think if you do your research and are prepared it’s actually pretty easy.  I’m already planning my next batch of macarons.  I’m just looking for a good (and easy) salted caramel version.

For more information on how to make macarons check out these collection of links:
David Lebovtiz
Serious Eats