Dear meringue shell crazy people,

It’s time for fillings, flavours and frippery!

This article will be shorter than the others. I feel that the filling is where the cook has the opportunity to show their initiative and creativity and I want to communicate general principles rather than fine detail.

Fillings

There are probably five main types of filling:

• jam (probably the original filling) — confiture
• ganache
• butter cream — crème au beurre
• thickened creams
• caramel

I won’t say anything about jam, but will comment on the other types below.

Please remember that this material is copyright. If you want to use any part of it (beyond a very short quote), please contact me for permission.

Ganache

A cream, chocolate and butter mixture, ganache can provide a strongly flavoured counter to the sweetness of the macaron shell. It can also act as a milder carrier for other flavours. White chocolate ganache is often combined with acid fruits such as berries — a nifty way of getting popular fruit flavours while countering the tang of the fruit, but can sometimes end up too sweet and cloying.

Butter cream

Simplest of all is a mock cream, made by whipping butter and adding icing sugar. Almond meal is frequently added as it improves stability and absorbs some moisture. Mock cream can sometimes be a little gritty.

More flexible than a ganache, a butter cream is a fairly neutral canvas for flavouring and colouring as you please. A basic rich butter cream (egg yolks, sugar syrup, butter) is simple but easily too rich. When cold it can be too firm for immediate eating, and when at warm room temperature it can begin to feel greasy when eating the macaron.

Another option is a lighter butter cream, where Italian meringue (yet more sugar syrup!) is added to the basic butter cream. This is a popular option amongst some bakers.

And finally, another simple butter cream: with whole eggs and sugar heated in a bain marie, beaten until thick and then with butter added. Also popular and less inclined to seem greasy.

All butter creams tend to be disappointing in a macaron which is served cold. The textures don’t match and the flavours are muted.

Pink and yellow shells, filled with rose and apricot butter creams.

Thickened cream preparations

Many of the classic French creams are given some structural reinforcement by adding some gelatine. Most of these (chiboust, bavaroise, etc) are suitable if prepared to a consistency which can be happily piped when cool. These thickened creams, and also standard crème pâtissière, are often used in larger macarons and macaron cakes, probably because they hold their shape better at a range of temperatures and under different loads.

Caramel

And this is where this article series sort of started! The response to my salted caramel macarons provided the impetus for a comprehensive look at macarons. I make a simple sugar-cream-butter caramel and add salt. It’s inspired by the salted butter caramel popular in the north of France (Brittany and Normandy), but rather than using salted butter, I like the sensation and variation in flavour experience created by crystals of salt.

Other caramels are fine too, of course, though the sweetness can be overdone. Flavoured caramels are probably more interesting.

Uncoloured macarons filled with salted caramel (a little too fresh and runny!).

Salted caramel

There are many other things you could make to fill macarons, but I’ll leave that to your imagination!

Colours and flavours

Beyond the basic creams and other fillings, it pays to think about how you can enhance the flavour sensation of these pâtisserie divas. Coarse nut pieces and other textural elements can be fun, as can an interplay between the flavour of the shell and the flavour of the cream inside. Most pâtissiers don’t play with the shells’ flavour because it makes it harder to deploy the batter for a range of macarons. I love flavouring my shells with citrus zest and then using a filling with a complementary flavour. Some of the better producers spray the inside of the shell with an aroma (such as a flower water or flavoured syrup) and then use a differently flavoured cream.

Liquid colourings are the most obvious choice for home cooks, but professional powder colourings are often used and I’ve read of some bakers using powdered fruit which is a fun idea. Whatever the colour, I feel the shell should entice. Too often when trying to not overdo it, my shells have been the faintest pastel colour, barely here or there. You need to be bolder! On the other hand, some disappointing producers go for maxi-colour, beyond bold and into lurid. If the colour evokes, say, the fruit in the filling, that’s great; if it looks like an accident with rotten raspberries or an ageing banana, well, no.

Chocolate shell with chocolate-cinnamon ganache. Lemon shell with ganache. Chocolate shell with lemon-basil cream.

Part of the allure of these divas is that they’re a visual treat. They can be beautiful in their naked simplicity, or they can be a painter’s canvas.

Think about what you want to achieve. Experiment. Enjoy!

You can also read La Macaronicité 1: an introduction to the macaron.
La Macaronicité 2: basic technique and simple macaron recipe.
La Macaronicité 3: the more reliable macaron recipe and a few tips.
La Macaronicité 5: Macawrongs and macarights, macarons day and night.

– DM

Macaroniers, Macaronistes et Macaroneurs,

So you want to make better macarons? Welcome to the third instalment of La Macaronicité at Syrup & Tang! If you missed the introduction, click here to read it. And if you want to learn about basic technique, ingredients and method, visit the second article.

La Macaronicité: Advanced technique and knowledge

Main sections:

Ingredients
Fundamentals
Recipe B — macarons au sucre cuit
Background to my recipe

Please remember that this material is copyright. If you want to use any part of it (beyond a very short quote), please contact me for permission.

There’s a lot of information here and it’s possible that not everything applies to your kitchen or experience. I don’t know everything about them (there’s a limit to how many kilos of almond meal a poor writer can buy!). I welcome feedback about other solutions/explanations/ideas, but please don’t submit comments listing other recipes unless it contributes to a better understanding of the actual process and problems. You’re welcome to contact me directly if you prefer and I’ll incorporate helpful info into the article where appropriate.

Ingredients

To summarise the more detailed ingredient information from the previous article, the macaron batter consists of only four ingredients:

• almond meal (ground almond) – amandes en poudre
• pure icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar, no starch added) – sucre glace
• egg whites, preferably old – blancs d’œufs
• sugar – sucre

On occasion you might also see mention of cream of tartar or salt, both of which strengthen egg white foam.

The batter may be coloured (very common) and flavoured (less common, though not too difficult).

There are three types of recipe:

1. macarons au blanc monté (1) – a simple eggwhite foam is combined with the dry ingredients; preferred in Pierre Hermé’s books
2. macarons au blanc monté (2) – a simple French meringue is combined with the dry ingredients; in most other books, including Alain Ducasse
3. macarons au sucre cuit – an Italian meringue is combined with the dry ingredients; preferred in most professional books

I’ll explain the third recipe type (Italian meringue) here.

The important differences in this style of macaron recipe are as follows:

Meringue: This recipe uses a so-called Italian meringue, made with a hot sugar syrup which is beaten into the whipped egg white.

An Italian meringue gives this beautiful peak, called a ‘bec d’oiseau’ (bird’s beak) in French.

Mixing: As with the simpler recipe, at first the ingredients won’t mix together well. The Italian meringue is slower to pick up the dry ingredients and needs a bit more mixing to achieve a smooth batter. If you find you have lumps of powder in the batter, don’t be scared to smear the batter against the side of the bowl with the spatula. The final batter looks fluffier (some visible bubbles) than for the simple recipe. If the batter sits for any length of time the aeration becomes more apparent. That’s fine. This batter seems a little more tolerant of overmixing. This mixture dries out much more quickly than the simple one, but also remains usable for longer. Just cover the bowl with plastic film until you need it (e.g., if you’re baking multiple batches).

Crusting: I experimented with leaving some macarons to crust for an hour. The surface was actually almost hard after this time! Popped them in the oven and they rose happily, though some air bubbles made the surface irregular. The most striking difference between crusted and uncrusted macarons is that the former have a clearly defined line between the shell and the foot. On the downside, the shell was thicker than desirable. [UPDATE: after more testing, I now recommend permitting the shells to sit for half an hour or so. It helps reduce some problems if your oven has strong heat below the baking tray.]

Sugar syrup: The syrup is made by simmering off moisture until you achieve a certain sugar concentration, which is judged by its temperature. If only making a small quantity of syrup (e.g. for the recipe example quantity below), it’s best to use a small narrow saucepan or even a Turkish coffee pot.

Hot sugar syrup can cause bad burns, so be careful of splashing and don’t feel tempted to stick your finger in it! You need a digital thermometer or sugar thermometer to check the temperature. (Actually, you can check it using the old-fashioned drop test into cold water, but for that I suggest you check out one of your cookbooks — look up ‘firm ball’ stage.) Syrups harden quickly as they cool, so you need to have your equipment and ingredients ready to go.

Oven: Being slightly less touchy, this recipe doesn’t require changing temperatures and leaving the oven door ajar. You should be able to cook the shells at one temperature with the door closed. In general, you’ll lose fewer shells to burning or sticking if you use your first attempt to work out the best temperature for your oven — just cook a few macarons at a time at different temps (or trust me, LOL).

In testing, I found that at 150C the shells came off the paper beautifully, had good feet, but had air pockets. At 160C air pockets were absent, but the bottoms were just a bit sticky. At 170C the feet were more modest (still good) but the bottoms were sometimes too sticky. Permitting the shells to crust before baking gave a good rise (feet) and fairly dry bottoms, but a duller shell.

This is what happens with batter at different levels of mixing when cooked at 150C.

Experiment with temperatures: air pockets at low temperature.

Be brave and face the batter!

Recipe B
macarons au sucre cuit; (Italian meringue)

This method is rarely found on the English-speaking internet and is only mentioned in a small number of professional cookbooks. It is fairly reliable, though still requires some practice.

Decide how many eggs you want to sacrifice. Crack and separate the eggs, remembering to keep the whites and all vessels and implements scrupulously free of fat or egg yolk. You don’t need to weigh the egg whites at this point. One egg white will yield about fourteen 3-4 cm macaron shells.

It isn’t necessary to age the eggs (though probably doesn’t hurt).

Formula and method

When you’re ready to start cooking, weigh the egg whites and then scale the recipe appropriately. The formula is below.

‘eggwhite’ refers to the weight of the egg whites in grams. The righthand column provides an example calculation.

Ingredient		Amount		Example	(with eggwhite=50 gm)
Almond meal		1.35 x eggwhite		1.35 x 50 =	67 gm
Icing sugar		1.35 x eggwhite		1.35 x 50 =	67 gm
Sugar		1.35 x eggwhite		1.35 x 50 =	67 gm
Water		0.33 x eggwhite		0.33 x 50 =	16 gm
Egg white					50 gm

A batter with 50 gm egg white should yield one baking tray 30 cm x 40 cm or approximately 25 shells.

Preheat your oven:
Conventional oven: centre rack, 160C. Convection oven: 140C

Background to my recipe

There’s only really one formula for the Italian meringue style of macaron recipe, as illustrated here. Alain Ducasse (in his Grand Livre de Cuisine: Alain Ducasse’s Desserts and Pastries) is approximately 1.4:1.4:1.0:1.4 (almond:icing sugar:egg white:sugar). My favourite book, by Christophe Felder (Les Macarons de Christophe), uses a ratio of 1.33:1.33:1.0:1.33. I’ve used both successfully, but settled for a compromise of 1.35:1.0. I don’t know how much impact these minor variations will have in your kitchen.

If you have any doubt about the preferability of the Italian meringue approach, read what talented Joycelyn at the beautiful Kuidaore site has to say, or see what Kitchen Wench has written about her macaron adventures.

For troubleshooting and additional info on technique, remember to read the previous article.

  

Pause for breath

I’ll leave everyone who is so inclined to play with their delicious divas over the weekend. Next week I’ll write about fillings and flavours, amongst other things.

My piping gun has cracked, my piping bag is torn, and I have fourteen neglected egg yolks in the fridge, clamouring for use!

Naked shell with chocolate ginger ganache. My midnight snack.

You can read La Macaronicité 1: an introduction to the macaron.
La Macaronicité 2: basic technique and simple macaron recipe.
La Macaronicité 4: fillings, flavours, frippery.
La Macaronicité 5: Macawrongs and macarights, macarons day and night.

– DM

Mesdames et messieurs, enfants et français charmants,

So you want to make macarons? Welcome to the second instalment of La Macaronicité at Syrup & Tang! If you missed the introduction, click here to read it.

La Macaronicité: Technique and knowledge

Main sections:

Ingredients
Fundamentals
Recipe A — macarons au blanc monté
Background to my recipe

Please remember that this material is copyright. If you want to use any part of it (beyond a very short quote), please contact me for permission.

There’s a lot of information here and it’s possible that not everything applies to your kitchen or experience. I don’t know everything about them (there’s a limit to how many kilos of almond meal a poor writer can buy!). I welcome feedback about other solutions/explanations/ideas, but please don’t submit comments listing other recipes unless it contributes to a better understanding of the actual process and problems. You’re welcome to contact me directly if you prefer and I’ll incorporate helpful info into the article where appropriate.

Ingredients

The macaron batter consists of only four ingredients:

• almond meal (ground almond) – amandes en poudre
• pure icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar, no starch added) – sucre glace
• egg whites, preferably old – blancs d’œufs
• sugar, preferably caster sugar – sucre semoule

On occasion you might also see mention of cream of tartar or salt, both of which strengthen egg white foam.

The batter may be coloured (very common) and flavoured (less common, though not too difficult).

There are three types of recipe:

1. macarons au blanc monté (1) – a simple eggwhite foam is combined with the dry ingredients; preferred in Pierre Hermé’s books
2. macarons au blanc monté (2) – a simple French meringue is combined with the dry ingredients; in most other books, including Alain Ducasse
3. macarons au sucre cuit – an Italian meringue is combined with the dry ingredients; preferred in most professional books

I’ll explain the second recipe type (French meringue) here, and introduce the third type in the next article.

Fundamentals

Almond meal is a fine cream-coloured powder made from ground blanched almonds. If it is very fresh it might be a little damp, so you could dry it very gently in a barely warm oven. You can make your own almond meal, but it will be hard to grind fine enough and will be damp.

Icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar) is often sold with starch added (then called ‘icing mixture’ in Australia). This prevents it from clumping, but can leave a pasty mouthfeel if used in icing and is undesirable (though not fatal) in macarons. Use unadulterated (pure) icing sugar if possible.

The almond meal and icing sugar should be put through a high speed food processor or a (clean) blade coffee grinder to obtain a very fine powder (about 10 seconds on highest speed should suffice). Most almond meal is more like sand than flour, so if you leave it unprocessed the macarons will have a coarser surface. No big drama, but we’re looking for perfection, right?

Egg whites consist of proteins and quite a lot of water. The water can make the final batter unmanageably wet, either in the making or in the oven (where the macarons refuse to dry adequately). Old egg whites have lost some of their water content through evaporation so can yield a more successful batter, though this is by no means guaranteed (from personal experience, even evaporating 15% of some egg whites didn’t help). There are also changes in the composition of the proteins with time, but I haven’t seen any analysis to explain why this might be better for macarons. It is also said that older egg whites yield a thicker meringue shell. Many professional recipes use dried egg white (egg white powder) to bolster the protein content.

Bottomline: do not fret about a few hours of ageing here or there; if you have time to age your eggs that’s good. If you don’t, then just use the oldest eggs (ie, not the newest carton) in your fridge that haven’t gone rotten yet.

Oven temperature is a big problem. Very few recipes specify whether the author uses a conventional or a fan-forced (convection) oven. This difference has implications for (1) even temperature, (2) speed of temperature recovery after putting the tray in the oven, (3) actual temperature appropriate for your oven, (4) humidity.

It would seem that a fan-forced oven sometimes offers greater success (though others say the opposite), but I haven’t been able to test this firsthand, as I live in renting-with-old-gas-oven land. Many recipes that explicitly mention a conventional oven recommend starting the macarons at a high temperature and then leaving the oven door ajar and dropping the temperature. There are two possible reasons: (1) this gives the initial lift that the batter needs and then permits drying and firming without burning (propping the door open helps lower the temperature quickly), and (2) this seals the surface of the macaron quickly, preventing cracking and helping it lift as the foot forms. Of course you could take the Roux brothers’ (Roux Brothers on Patisserie) approach and just have two ovens at different temperatures. Yeah, right.

To ensure slow, even heat distribution underneath the macarons, it’s desirable to use two or even three baking trays (cookie sheets) on top of each other. Again, many authors fail to mention that they’re using (and stacking) professional-grade aluminium sheets which are considerably thicker than the cheapo homecook type. I’d probably need six of my flimsy baking trays stacked together! I recently tried using an insulated baking sheet for the first time and found that my previous problems with sticky-bottomed macarons were greatly reduced.

Baking on non-stick baking paper is the best approach. Silicone sheets and Silpat are fine for a successful batch, but just try removing tenaciously sticky, fragile, failed macaron shells from one of these and it will end in tears!

Meringue: when you incorporate it into the almond mixture, you don’t want any pussyfooted folding (e.g., as for mousse or sponges) but nor are you allowed to beat the shit out of it. You need to work quickly and efficiently, incorporating the dry ingredients smoothly but without excessive mixing. At first the ingredients won’t mix well, but it comes together quickly. The final batter is pale and smooth, with no visible aeration.

Piping: if you’re confident at piping, pipe from the side, pulling the tail up over the macaron so that it disappears quickly. However, it’s easier to pipe vertically over the centre, about 5 mm above the tray surface. Flick the nozzle towards the edge as you pull away to finish.

Crusting: more than half of the world’s macaron recipes mention leaving the piped macarons to rest so that they form a ‘skin’ or ‘crust’. There seems to be very little evidence that this makes any difference in the final product. For some batters it will actually cause a duller shell. Maybe resting is necessary for some people’s kitchens, but I didn’t observe a benefit across four tests. It does, however, seem wise to let the batter settle for just a few minutes on the baking tray (see ‘cracking’). [UPDATE: after more testing, I now recommend permitting the shells to sit for half an hour or so. It helps reduce some problems if your oven has strong heat below the baking tray.]

Humidity: I doubt that humidity in the oven is an issue for anyone, but do avoid making macarons on a very humid day as the mixture will tend to be too damp or require adjustment.

Cracking: a few minutes after going into the oven, some macarons batters will develop fissures. In my experience this is the result of (1) overmixing, or (2) rushing the piped batter straight into the oven.

Maturing/ripening: the shells are not at their best when fresh. They will be slightly chewier around the edges than expected. Usually the macarons are assembled and then stored in the fridge for one to two days, after which they are heavenly.

For your edification, here are some useful photos:

Freshly piped good batter is on the left. Note how the overbeaten batter, on the right, is darker and looks slightly translucent. (The specks in the batter are vanilla.)

If you’re not scared yet, still ready to face the batter, congratulations!

Recipe A
macarons au blanc monté (2); (French meringue)

This method is the one you’ll find almost everywhere on the internet and in most cookbooks. It is simple but fraught with disappointment. In my experience (dodgy ovens, no fan, domestic trays), this style of recipe can yield less than 50% success rate. If you possess a digital probe thermometer or a sugar thermometer I’d recommend waiting for Recipe B. But there are perfectly happy people out there with, presumably, better kitchens than I. (You can see a charming fella explaining it (in French) on video here, and one of the clearest shorter explanations in writing is by Coco&Me. One brave experimenter, Veronica’s Test Kitchen, may also have useful tips for you if you prefer this style of recipe.)

Regardless of what the recipes say, I suggest first deciding how many eggs you want to sacrifice. Crack and separate the eggs, remembering to keep the whites and all vessels and implements scrupulously free of fat or egg yolk. You don’t need to weigh the egg whites at this point. One egg white will yield about fourteen 3-4 cm macaron shells.

This recipe will benefit most from aged egg whites or egg white powder. You can age the whites by leaving them uncovered at room temperature for 24-72 hours in a shallow bowl. This allows some of the moisture to evaporate. Cover the bowl with gauze or kitchen paper (not plastic) if you want to avoid any dust or other surprises. People are often apprehensive about leaving egg whites at room temperature, but the final cooked product will be safe even if the raw egg white might have been contaminated.

Formula and method

When you’re ready to start cooking, weigh the egg whites and then scale the recipe appropriately. The formula is below.

‘eggwhite’ refers to the weight of the egg whites in grams. The righthand column provides an example calculation.

Ingredient	Amount	Example (with eggwhite=50 gm )
Almond meal	1.3 x eggwhite	1.3 x 50 = 65 gm
Icing sugar	1.6 x eggwhite	1.6 x 50 = 80 gm
Castor sugar	0.8 x eggwhite	0.8 x 50 = 40 gm
Egg white		50 gm
Total weight		_______ 235 gm

A batter with 50 gm egg white should yield one baking tray 30 cm x 40 cm or approximately 25 shells.

Preheat your oven:
Conventional oven: centre rack, 180C. Convection oven: 160C

Background to my recipe

A very standard formula for the French meringue style of macaron recipe is approximately 1.25:2.3:1.0:0.3 (almond:icing sugar:egg white:caster sugar). Variants of this are used by Alain Ducasse, Christophe Felder, J.M.Perruchon & G.J.Bellouet and Dean Brettschneider. Pierre Hermé’s formula is similar, though not using a meringue. Each of these authors has a different approach to temperature and crusting. Popular American writer David Lebovitz published a chocolate macaron recipe on his site which many people found reliable (and is the one I made without trouble and showed a picture of in the first article in this series). His recipe is, however, much sweeter and uses a stronger meringue. I noticed, too, that Pascal Rigo’s popular recipe also takes this approach, as does Sydney chef Justin North in his recent book French Lessons. I didn’t want the sweetness, but tried adapting the approach, with the result presented above (formula of 1.30:1.60:1.00:0.80). The total sugar is only slightly higher than the most common formula and the slight increase in almond meal seems to make it less wet.

Famous internet recipes: if you go surfing you’ll find many recipes. Some are useful, some are rubbish, and many are unattributed. There’s a very popular online recipe which has spread far and wide but is rarely correctly attributed to Pascal Rigo (from his wonderful book American Boulangerie). The majority of the remaining recipes are from Pierre Hermé’s various books.

Famous chefs’ recipes: even Hermé has occasionally underdescribed his recipes, but real disapproval should be directed at those who have blithely provided poorly explained recipes for a product as temperamental as this. I greatly doubt that most restaurants make their macarons using the first style of recipe I discuss (unless they have access to egg white powder), so why foist it on the uninitiated? Note, too, that French pâtissiers readily admit that it can take some time for a macaron-maker to get used to a new kitchen if he/she changes jobs.

Troubleshooting

My macarons are delicate and sticky. They fall apart or lose their insides when I try to lift them off the baking paper. Solution: Don’t wet the paper. Instead, place the sheet of paper (with stuck macarons) on a drying rack and walk away for a few hours. In my experience the shells will be fairly easy to peel off once they’ve cooled and their bases have dried a little. These shells will usually be too damp for use for proper macarons. Save them for one of the alternative uses listed below.

My macarons are firm and chewy. Solution: Cook them for less time or at a lower temperature.

My macarons brown too quickly on top. Solution: Try covering a spare oven shelf with foil and place it on the rung above the macarons in the oven.

My macarons have a big empty space under the shell. Solution: Cook them at a higher temperature. (There may also be other causes.)

My macarons have frilly feet which extend sideways from the shell. Solution: This is often a problem with the simple recipe, but seems worse at low temperatures. Try letting the piped batter rest for a while before baking.

Alternative uses

Whilst I wish everyone success, it’s worth having a backup use for any abortive macaronic adventures.

Dessert 1: break up the macarons and place a number of pieces in a tall glass. Add morello cherries. Pour on some port. Leave to stand for 15 minutes. Top with whipped cream. Pour a little cherry juice over the cream. Serve.

Dessert 2: make a trifle-like dish with berries.

Dessert 3: give to unsuspecting friends or neighbours as ‘soft almond meringues’.

Phew!

You can read La Macaronicité 1: an introduction to the macaron.
La Macaronicité 3: the more reliable macaron recipe and a few tips.
La Macaronicité 4: fillings, flavours, frippery.
La Macaronicité 5: Macawrongs and macarights, macarons day and night.

– DM