Experimenting with French Macarons

Hello all,

It has been a couple of days since I last posted due to a Calculus II & physics exam that I needed to study for (after all, I am no professional pastry chef). Anyway, for the last couple of years I have been trying to make French Macarons to no avail. Aesthetically on the outside, everything was there. What really mattered to me was what was on the inside. So for the last couple of days, I have been experimenting. Here is what I came up with:

Experiment

I used Not so humble pie's recipe about 1/4 of the way down and modified it.
Here is a picture of the ingredients I used:

100g confectioner's sugar, 50g egg white, 15g granulated sugar, 60g almond flour

I started by using a food processor to finely blend the almond flour and the confectioner's sugar.

 The two ingredients should blend to literally look like regular all purpose flour.











I put that aside and I started to work on the egg whites. They weren't hard to do, just needed to be patient.

Note: Before adding in the granulated sugar, beat the egg white until it is foamy. 

Once foamy, I added the granulated sugar a little bit at a time on medium speed with an electric hand whisk. I paid particular attention to this step because other bloggers such as foodnouveau, Not so humble pie and Brave Tart indicated how the texture should look. Proteins could be broken down in two ways: mechanically or chemically. Here, we are taking the protein in the egg and mechanically breaking up the protein in the egg white a little and forcing air into them along with blending the granulated sugar (chemical component).

The shiny, glossy and stiff peaks that are needed.

My brother Ryan (The pastry chef) gave me a cool tip to let you know that the meringue is ready: turn the bowl upside down and if it doesn't fall out, you're good to go. I grew a set, took a deep breath and well, they didn't fall out. I guess they were ready!

Moving on. I decided to add color for kicks. This was apparently the step to do it. 3 drops of liquid food coloring and light folding with a spatula. 

After a couple of folds, I added 1/3 of my flour mixture which looked like this:

Note: it looks streaky because I haven't fully folded the coloring in. That will happen as  you fold the flour.

This part, which is known as "Macaronage" is a pain in the ass. Here is why. As the dry ingredients are being incorporated into the mechanically/chemically altered egg white, the air within them has to be dispersed back into the environment. With a little bit of pressure from folding bottom to top, this will be achieved and will look a little something like this:

13 folds in

The second part of why this is a pain is because the number of folds really matters. The batter has to be the perfect consistency of awesomeness to really insure smooth shells and even distribution of all the ingredients blended. So I counted to the perfect consistency: 40 folds.

40 folds in

People say "Lava-like" but I haven't been near an active volcano lately so i'm not exactly sure how to interpret that. 

Put all of that great batter into a piping bag. Twist the bag so you form enough pressure to pipe all of that batter. Another reason why you want to keep the folds right at 40 is because as you pipe, the batter leaves a high pressure area (inside the bag) to a lower pressure area (outside the bag). The pressure coming out of the nozzle is going to add a little to the flattening of the batter. Too many folds results in runny batter. 

Anyway, I decided to stack two baking trays together because the past couple of years, I figured one baking sheet would be too hot. 

I piped the batter STRAIGHT down which gives somewhat of a nice round shape (my piping skills suck). Then, another crucial step is to let these babies rest for half an hour. This time forms a film which after the time rested will not leave a residue on your finger if you touch them. 

Now here is where 2 avoidable years of pain was noticed: The oven. I purposely did not speak about the oven until now because I believe this needs special attention. Like most bloggers on this topic will say, every oven is different. Just like you and I, each one is unique. Don't trust the digital temp gauge or dial on your oven. Invest in an oven thermometer...one of the old school types that have a needle for an indicator. It's $3.99 at shoprite in the baking section. So I put it in there and realized that it was 25 degrees off. Did some math and adjusted time. The actual cooking temp I was now running was 280 degrees. This is what turned out:

Not Bad!! or...so I thought

I let them cool and then cut them open and I saw this:

WHAT THE HELL.  Granted, the bottom actually rose a lot better than it usually did, it was still hollow and it was still a little soggy with a retained shell.

Then something happened. The scientist in me had been stupid this whole time. I've practiced my technique of measuring, making egg white, folding and piping to a system but left one thing out. THE DAMN OVEN AGAIN.

Yeah sure, this time I checked temp but I left one thing out. I didn't realize how dramatically different the results would be if I just raised my oven rack to the top. So I did something for the name of science: I cranked up the oven temp to the actual temperature of 295-300 degrees (by means of the manual thermometer) and put the rack on top. To be sure I even doubled the parchment. Armed with this Fort Knox type of insulation....I killed it.

 Absolutely killed it...in a great way. Just thinking common sense changed dramatically. Yes the cookie was a little over done (I left it in the oven for longer) and the results show for itself. It's still a little hollow....but not like an igloo. Now, there is some body to it. This is progress. I'll take it.

 I just filled them with raspberry jelly and put them in an air tight container. I put these in the fridge and now I wait 24 hrs. I already know the insides are way better than anything I have ever made before. A couple days maturation will allow the moisture from the jam to diffuse into the shell causing equilibrium between the two gradients. This just means that the insides won't be crunchy anymore.

So what did I learn today? Something I should have taken more seriously for my first Bachelor's Degree: have a control experiment and make sure you experiment different possibilities.

Till Next time,

CCK