Macaron improvement, thanks to Syrup & Tang

So I only managed to get a photo of the very worst, for a self-deprecating tweet. The rest were slightly better.

It has been some weeks since my last confession post. There has been horribly cold weather, troubling economic and social developments near and far, kimchi and brie sandwiches, and newly discovered knitting.

There has been illness, much work, yet another failed batch of macarons, and a rejuvenating couple of days off to go to some sessions at the Melbourne Film Festival. It was after a gloomy-and-thus-right-up-my-alley Romanian film about infidelity and marriage breakdown that I hung out with Steeles at Brunetti’s and had one of their macarons, then another. 

With the brightly coloured little delights plus the rejuvenation, new enthusiasm sprung in my heart. And when I stumbled across an incredible site that night called Syrup & Tang, in which a brilliant food writer provides detail like no other seen anywhere, I was running not walking to separate those eggs and get some white maturation going. 

I like someone whose level of obsession makes mine seem the epitome of easygoing, nay, slack. And he’s right here in Melbourne, and is also somewhat scathing about the macaron efforts he’s found around these parts. I never knew there were so many – and this post was three years ago. I started making them before I went to Paris last year, and had never actually eaten one before; I've only noticed them on last year's Masterchef and gradually appearing around Melbourne in the last few months. But then, I don't get out much.

Among the gems of wisdom on offer at Syrup & Tang is a table that gives the proportions of almond meal and sugar per grams of egg white. This is about a hundred times better than trying to follow a recipe set out in numbers of eggwhites, or even weight of egg white; this formula frees one to use any amount of white one happens to have sitting about.

And there are comparison trouble-shooting photos. Among them I found the dead ringers for my failed, flattened attempts so far; gentle reader, it seems I am guilty of over-mixing as well as over-thinking and over-working. 

On offer are the two distinct techniques for macaron-making: French and Italian. I tried the simpler but less reliable French method first for the purple lavender ones, in which all the eggwhite (aged for 4 days in this case) is beaten at once. They were much better than any others so far, without the wild spreading after piping them out.

They even developed little feet, although the feet reduced slightly in size as they cooled. 

And then they tended to leave their guts on the silicon – too sticky inside, probably undercooked, although the edge ones had faintly browned surfaces. 

I stuck them in the fridge for a few days until I got around to trying the Italian method for the yellow lemon ones, which involves sugar syrup and beating only half the eggwhite (aged for 8 days now) – more like the Dorie Greenspan recipe. Even better! They were well-shaped and domed, and barely spread at all. 

They had feet! 

I still had problems with the sticky innards, and the trick of mostening the underside of the baking paper didn’t help...

 ...but I tried the final noted solution to this, of bunging the whole tray of macarons into the freezer for a while. They popped off like a charm.

I made up a ganache with 200g white chocolate, 200g cream and the fine zest of a lemon, and refrigerated it overnight for more solidity before using it to sandwich the macarons, but it was still too runny. It made the macarons too soft; they had to be eaten with the head held back, and the chin and fingers washed afterwards. Not good. 

Still. Closer. And these posts on the subject, amounting to essays, have been the find of the year. How can I possibly repay Syrup & Tang?

Macawrong II

No. These are not mine, they are made by someone much clever than me and I have stolen the picture from a photo library because I suck at macaroning.

And again to the actual subject of my blog, despite its tangents into biscuits and slices and such. It happens – I have a brainwave about a combination of flavours, forget the pain caused by the last macawrong, do a lot of online research into an alternative recipe and method that might just work this time, and schlepp over to Brunwick to buy another lot of almond meal at the inestimable Royal Nut Company.

This time wasn’t the time it worked.

This time, I found a recipe in the LA Times by none other than my favourite Dorie Greenspan, supported by an article she’d written with interesting notes about Pierre Hermé.

It was quite different to recipes I’d tried in the past, involving beating only half the eggwhites, then adding a sugar syrup heated to 125C to them, then just mixing the unbeaten remainder to the almond-and-icing sugar mix before adding the meringue and stirring.

Another interesting variation was layering the laden baking sheet on top of a spare one, and sliding the doubled setup into the oven.

And yet another was baking the macarons for 4 minutes at the preheated 180C, then quickly opening and closing the oven, and repeating.

What could go wrong with a recipe based on one by the man who ‘spent years studying the intricacies of macarons’? Mind you, I feel I’ve done the same by now, and that’s not working out so well.

I converted Dorie’s ingredients thusly, and figured out exactly what her ½ cup/4 eggwhites should weigh.

150g almond meal

150g icing sugar

½ US cup eggwhites (120g, or about 4)

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

150g white sugar

3 tablespoons water

Dorie didn’t say so much about what ‘mix well’ meant, so with my BodyPump-exhausted arms I counted one hundred melanges in French, or at least to fifty twice over so as to avoid the numbers getting all complicated (quatre-vingt-dix-sept – why did I take up learning this language?), due to something David Lebovitz said about them in his macaron post.There is such a bewildering array of approaches out there, and research that can be done and stones turned. Perhaps I overstirred for this recipe?

The only other variation was not adding the food colouring until I’d mixed well and then halved the mixture to add the different colours and flavours, and I can’t see how this could have affected anything.

I was trying for a magma-like consistency, but I’ve never really been close enough to magma to know what that is. I knew it wasn’t good when it flowed from the piping bag without any squeezing from me, and proceeded to spread flatly as pancake batter across the fibreglass sheet.

Here’s another thing. The first tray was totally flat. The second and third, for all their failings, developed little feet! Under the same conditions. Why bother being scientific when the universe is such a bitch?

Even the ones that developed little feet were impossible to remove from the fibreglass sheet in one piece, which is something I’ve only ever experienced back when I was using baking paper. They had to be scraped off, and I stuffed angry handfuls of them in my mouth until I felt ill and soaked the rest off in the sink and watched all that eggwhite and almond meal and carefully sifted icing sugar going down the drain. 

As obsessive as I feel keeping on going with trying to perfect this, it's that I think I’ve hit on a pleasing flavour combination. The addition of lemon zest and lavender oil to the two portions lifted the shells from being something quite boring and tasteless on their own to very eatable, even without the variations on white chocolate ganache I had planned for them.

Amazing reading online about failed macarons, such as this marvellous and informative post by Not So Humble Pie and all her commenters. Some people stuff them up so badly the macarons chirp like birds as they cool! I felt better after reading that, although less good when I read that a description mirroring my result was due to a phenomenon known as broken meringue. Have I been breaking all my meringues all these years?

By some beginners luck, I once made these work – the second or third time I tried, and even the first few were a good 70% better than this. I get 10% more sucktastic at macarons every time.

I aim to attempt these again next weekend, and have separated the eggs to prove it. The whites will sit out on the bench all week, just like the chefs do it, however counter-intuitive and against all food-safety it may seem. Meanwhile, I’d love to go to this workshop that Dorie went to, in Paris, wouldn’t I just.

Green tea and black sesame macarons

I had several reasons for spending far too much precious time making macarons today:

1)   procrastination

2)   imminent departure for Japan (provided we don’t get bumped again, for then I should give up rearranging my carefully laid plans and take to a darkened room instead of beating my fists against Acts of God and sending several of Flight Centre’s International Travel Consultants on stress leave) where they use such things as matcha and black sesame – why yes, you’re right, that is a flimsy connection

3)   procrastination

4)   the discovery that all the little plastic containers taking up space in the freezer added up to 18 egg whites, thanks to my recent ice-cream-making obsession

5)   procrastination

6)   I named my blog for them, and what do I have to show for that so far?

7)   procrastination

I’ll briefly run through my method for this; thankfully no one reads this blog in order to be mislead – to skip to the end and get it out of the way, these didn’t work and I don’t know why. 

Green tea version first. Sift 110g icing sugar, 70g almond meal and 2 tablespoons matcha into a bowl. I’m no greater fan than Nigella of sifting, but concede it’s best not to skip this step – the almond meal especially usually yields a half-teaspoon or so of not-so-fine meal that needs to be discarded lest it roughen the surface of the macaron. If only that were the extent of the macaron’s worries.

In an electric mixer, whisk 100mL eggwhite* and a pinch of salt until stiff. Add the teensiest bit of green food colouring – I jabbed a wooden skewer into my Wilton gel and used what came away on it, that’s how miniscule I’m talking. That pack of colours will see me out, I think.

 *100mL = 90g or about 3 whites. Probably about 5 tablespoons, although it’s very difficult to measure whites that way – there’s always a glutinous chunk that likes to slip out and take the level down with it.

Re-sift the sugar/flour/matcha over the bowl of whites and gently fold in until the mixture has achieved a magma-like consistency. Fill a piping bag fitted with a 5mm nozzle and pipe as best and consistently as possible onto a silicon-lined tray, as if creating little snails, flicking back the nozzle at the last instant to avoid a snail with a … tail. 

 This is where I go so very wrong, time and again. I’ve watched Youtube clips, I’ve read up, I’ve steadied my hand, I cannot get the uniformity of circle I so want. And because I have a crappy small oven that only takes a tray of meagre size, I fall into the trap of putting them too close together – they will spread a bit, and often do as they rest. 

In spite of having been in this pickle before, I did the same again today and then thought better of it and scraped the ones most at risk of colliding back into the piping bag with a spatula, in the process injuring the adjacent ones and sending them the same route. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I also chopped up some vanilla sencha and sprinkled that over them. 

Then I did the whole thing again for a batch of black sesame macarons, with about quarter of a cup ground black sesame seeds instead of the matcha. And no food colouring.

 

 The tray of circles or ovals or whatever then sit until their surface can be very lightly touched with the tip of a finger and not come stickily away on it. How long this takes depends on how warm and humid it is – a lot of recipes talk about half an hour, but I left these all day before they passed the touch test.

And then there is the baking of the macaron ...

So anyone anywhere with anything to say about macarons agrees that it’s a 150 C oven for 10–11 minutes. No more, no less. Well, that does nothing for mine. I bump it up to 170 and it still needs almost half an hour before any kind of hardening of the surface starts to happen. So I grow bored and walk away, and then they’re lightly browned, quelle horreur. And it gets worse.

THEY LACK FEET.

In fact, they’re nothing but flat discs with too much crunch. How do they not have feet? I don’t know the answer – I’m none too clear on how perfectly made macarons do form feet.

This lot are actually the worst macarons I’ve ever made, worse even than my first attempt. I really could do with one of those fabulously expensive weekend macaron workshops.

And there it is. Sunday Fail Part II.

I was loath to waste a perfectly good ganache on these sorry specimens, so I knocked together a buttercream filling with another 2 eggwhites, 100g castor sugar, 170g butter and some vanilla extract. The resulting sandwiches did have a good taste – the degrees of matcha and black sesame seemed okay, not too overpowering or subtle, so I might try these again. One day.