Recipe: Basic French Macaron

For about the past 10 years, it's been my mission to create the perfect macaron recipe and the technique to accompany it. In this lesson, I'm gonna teach you about ingredients for macarons, proper folding technique, and once we have it all together, it's gonna go into a piping bag and I'm gonna show you a very quick, easy and efficient way to pipe your macarons. I have the ingredients and equipment detailed in your course materials. But I wanna briefly go through them here, so you guys see them and you understand what you need to make your macarons. Number one, you need blanched almond meal.

And once you buy it, you're gonna store any leftover almond meal in the freezer so that it's nice and fresh. And there's no need to thaw it before you need to go use it, just weigh it out right from the freezer. You also need egg whites from eggs. Now I know that sounds like the most ridiculous statement, but it's true. They need to be separated egg whites, not egg whites that you might buy at the grocery store that you use for an egg white omelet, they have to be sourced from eggs.

Now there's a lot of information and a lot of mythology out there about macarons and many, many recipes and books tell you that you need to age your egg whites before you go to make your macarons. Actually, the egg has begun aging as soon as it comes out of the chicken. So unless you're sourcing your eggs from your own chickens, it's really okay to go ahead and separate your eggs, and you can just sail right into your macarons. However, if it makes you feel more comfortable, you can age your egg whites by measuring out the amount that you need for your recipe, and the recipe is in your course materials, covering it and putting it in the refrigerator overnight. Now, egg whites, any leftover egg whites that you have maybe from making ice cream, pastry cream, creme brulee, whatever other pastry adventures you're having.

When you have excess egg whites, you can freeze them. They freeze beautifully for four to five months in an airtight container. And then when you're ready to thaw them, just put 'em in the refrigerator and thaw them, takes about 24 hours for them to thaw safely in the refrigerator. All right, so almond meal, egg whites. Now we have our sugars.

We have powdered sugar and we have granulated sugar. Both these ingredients should be premium supermarket brand sugars. That means pure cane sugar for your granulated sugar and your powdered sugar is pure cane sugar, but powdered sugar has a little bit of corn starch added to it. So we wanna use premium supermarket brands, in the U.S we have brands like CNH and Domino. On the package it will tell you 3% corn starch added by volume.

And that 3% corn starch is just fine. So now you might be thinking, why do I have to be picky about my corn starch? And the reason is, is that corn starch is not regulated by the FDA. That is, the amount of corn starch that can be added to powdered sugar, there's no regulation on it. So lesser brands can add as much as they want, but the premium brands keep to the industry standard of 3% by volume.

And that little bit of corn starch actually helps dries out our shell, so it's a good thing. There's books out there and blogs out there that suggest you source organic sugar for your macarons. And there's no need to do that. Just premium, pure cane process sugar is perfectly fine. Believe me, when you need to spend up, I'll tell you.

Some of those organic sugars are three to four times the price of these sugars and the natural impurities in organic sugar can give you some problems when you go to make your meringue. So, now the last ingredient that's really helpful is cream of tartar. Cream of tartar is a bake shop acid that helps stabilize our egg whites. And it has a shelf life of about five years. So if you have a little container like this in your cupboard, it's probably just fine.

We're only gonna use a pinch of it anyway. All right, let's get started. The one thing that I don't do with my macarons, and this is a little bit of heresy, is I don't sift and you'll see why in a second. For this recipe, you're gonna need access to a food processor or something like this, cuisinart mini prep, and this will free you from the arduous job of sifting. So what I do is I take my powdered sugar.

Half of it. All of my almond meal and the rest of my powdered sugar. And I layer it in the mini prep. And we're going to grind this down to a fine powder. All right, I'm gonna get these things out of the way so you can see.

Many recipes have you sifting the powdered sugar three and four times, but with this technique it's not necessary at all. All right, so let's recipe recap, powdered sugar, almond meal, powdered sugar. I want the almond meal in the center so that the nut powder doesn't heat up and become oily. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pulse about six times, and then I'm gonna just smack the sides of the mini prep so that the, it all kind of falls down toward the center and I'm going to grind it. I teach a lot of macaron classes and in my classes, we call this technique.

Zhuzhing, grinding is such a harsh word. So all in all that was about 12 pulses with the mini prep. If you see any raw bits of almond meal, just smack the side of the bowl, let it all fall and give it a few more pulses. So now what we're gonna do is we're going to dump the almond meal and powdered sugar into a separate bowl. And there is a direct correlation with how, if this is super fine, then the top of your macaron shell is going to be nice and smooth.

Alrighty. Now we're gonna move over to our mixer and we're gonna start whisking or whipping our egg whites. Now this particular macaron recipe uses a French meringue technique. And what that means is the egg whites are raw and the sugar is raw. So French meringue, there are other techniques out there, but I find using the French meringue technique is the most accessible of all the techniques of making meringue for macarons.

The two other ones are Swiss and Italian, and they are more advanced techniques. And honestly, many of my students will master those techniques, but they return to this recipe because it's really, really, you can count on this recipe and this technique. All right, so what's going to go in here are my egg whites and a two finger pinch of cream of tartar. Now what I've learned in all my years of teaching is that my students are divided into two categories. Half of you are artists, half of you are engineers.

So for my artists, a two finger pinch is okay, but my engineers, they want to know precise measurements. So an eighth of a teaspoon of cream of tartar. So now we're gonna drop the bowl and I'm locking the head of the mixer in place. Now we're asking a lot, this is a five quart bowl, and this is approximately four ounces of egg whites. So, in order to get the whisk to drop and actually make full contact with the whites, I'm gonna teach you a very important technique, with the mixer off the head is locked into place, you're gonna get in here, you're gonna lift and just unclip the whisk out of its little catch, and it will drop down slightly and make full contact with the egg whites.

For those of you using a stainless steel bowl, the whisk of stainless steel, the bowl is stainless steel all will be well, you will have no metal reaction, all right? So here we go. So recipe recap, egg whites and cream of tartar, I've dropped the whisk, and now I'm gonna turn the mixer on to speed four. So medium speed. So the mixer is on speed four, and we're gonna take this until it looks like cappuccino foam or latte foam.

It should no longer be liquidy, but it really doesn't have any structure yet. There should be no greenish liquid at the bottom of the bowl. And when it looks like that, and actually it got there pretty quickly, when it looks like that, we're going to rain in our sugar. So we're on medium speed and I'm just gonna shake the sugar down the side of the bowl. Now it's inevitable that you get a little sugar on the side of the mixer bowl.

So what I want you to do is quickly stop, click your whisk into place and scrape down, all right? That should take very little time, drop, lock. And now we're going to go to medium high speed, all right? So our sugar is in, we're gonna go to medium high speed until it looks like marshmallow fluff. It's shiny, it's still soft.

It doesn't have a peak structure yet. And it's there right now. So let's look at this. It's still falling over on itself, it's shiny from the sugar, and for those of you who are familiar with marshmallow fluff, that's exactly what it looks like. It's at this stage that I'm going to add color and flavor.

And for your colors, gel color is the way to go with this macaron. Supermarket food colors just won't cut it, and powdered color doesn't work either. Gel color has a little bit of glycerin in it, and the glycerin helps control the water content of the color. And I found this lately, I just came to this a few weeks ago and that is, I put the color on the bottom of the whisk and that way it incorporates nice and smoothly. I'm also gonna add a little bit of flavor.

Now we can't get carried away because if we add too much flavoring to our shells, we're going to, they won't work properly. We have a very delicate chemistry going on here with our egg whites. So I like to use an eye dropper and I'm gonna add two drops of vanilla. Okay, now... I'm gonna go to high speed and we are going to start looking for peak.

This is a beautiful color. All right, so now let's start checking for peak. This whole notion of peak is such a hard thing to discern. And in fact, you are not going to look at the peak at all. You're gonna look at the angle of the peak.

So let's see where we're at right now. I'm gonna dip the whisk into the egg whites, turn it right side up and there's our perfect peak right there. The perfect peak that tells me nothing. It's right here. The angle of the peak tells me everything.

So, when you're making a meringue and you wanna go to soft peak, think of the angle being like ten o'clock, as you are looking at it, soft peak, ten o'clock, medium peak, eleven o'clock, firm peak is about 11:30. If you're at twelve o'clock high, you've gone too far. Also, you don't want to take a lot of batter on your whisk when you're testing for peak, because you're gonna get a soft read. It's kind of the Goldilocks school of baking. You're just gonna gently dip the whisk into the batter, turn it right side up, and you're gonna look right here for that angle.

And that looks good, that looks about 11:30 to me. All right, so now, we're gonna unhook the bowl, preferably not break it, tap out our excess, and I'm gonna transfer this to this big glass bowl. So one of the things you need, you need a bowl that has a nice wide, a nice wide bowl with good surface area. And it doesn't matter what this bowl is made out of. It could be your chip bowl, it doesn't matter.

Because we have just set the stage for our macaronage. Macaronage for me, the way I like to teach it, Macaronage has two parts. Part one and then part two. Part one is getting your dry ingredients into your now perfect meringue and part two, I will get to in a moment. So what we're gonna do is we are going to add our dry ingredients in three increments.

You're gonna eyeball it, no need to weigh it out. I'm going to fold the dry ingredients into the meringue, using a very specific technique. Whoops. And I'm gonna show you out of the bowl. It's a big J, you're slicing through the center of the batter, flipping the spatula over as you come to the bottom and go up the side of the bowl, and as you flip the spatula over, you are turning the bowl, spinning the bowl, not turning it.

Now I'm gonna add the next third of dry ingredients. One thing that's critical, a critical piece of equipment that you need for your macarons is a nice flat spatula, no hybrid spoon spatulas, a good baker's flat spatula like I'm holding in my hand. Because it's so important that we're able to cover good surface area when we're folding. So this is the third increment of the dry ingredients. And while I still have some dry ingredients, I'd like to kind of slow this down so you guys can see it in motion.

All right, so starting at the top, slice through the center and spin the bowl. What I don't want you to do is pick up the bowl and stir, I don't want you to have the bowl flat stirring around and around. You want to employ the J technique, it's really important. And you can use this for all your other baking and you'll find your ingredients go in easier and better. And your product does not deflate as much.

All right, macaronage part one is completed. Now we're gonna go onto macaronage part two. And although this looks really beautiful, now we have to go in and knock out some excess air. So, the way we do this, and this is a technique I stole from tempering chocolate and it works really well for our macarons. You're gonna take your nice wide flat spatula, and you're going to paint the batter up the side of the bowl, like a big flower, and then you're gonna swoop it down to the center of the bowl.

And then we're gonna paint again. And what I'm looking for is I'm looking for the batter to just slowly slide down the side of the bowl. And it usually takes on average three swoops and paints before your batter is perfect. So I'm on my third one. And as you can see it sliding down the side of the bowl and you wanna stop right here, right when you see it just begin to exhale down the side of the bowl, because if you overdo it, your macarons are going to be too thin.

They will expand too much and you're not gonna be happy. So again, what you're looking for, you're looking for it just to slowly slide down the side of the bowl, as one of my students from Hawaii says, it should look like the lava you can run away from. I don't know about that, but that's what she said. So now it's perfect and I'm gonna get ready and put it in my piping bag, and we're gonna pipe out our macarons. In my bag, I have an taco number 12 size tip.

It can be a Wilton number 12. It can be anything that has an opening of about three eights of an inch. In your course materials, you have macaron templates to download and print, and I recommend that you print several copies and then store some because you always wanna have, well, you can always download them, but it's nice to have them on hand because once you start making macarons, you won't stop, trust me. So, here I have my macaron templates and I have a sheet of parchment paper on top. Now we're gonna bake our macarons at a temperature low enough so our paper won't be compromised.

If you don't wanna use the templates, these are available at kitchen stores and online. So those are pretty easy to find. So I'm gonna go ahead fill my bag. And at this stage, there's no stopping. There's no storing this batter, no coming back to this later.

Once you make your batter and complete your macaronage, you have to keep going, all righty. We're using an 18 inch disposable piping bag, you can use a reusable piping bag that's just fine, but I recommend it's at least 16 inches long because a small bag is going to be difficult for you to handle when you're piping out your macarons. All right, let's get everything out of the way so that you can see. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the bag with the C of my hand, and I'm gonna twist, twist, twist. We're not gonna worry about this mess here.

And before I even start piping my circles, I'm gonna show you how you're gonna do this. So what's really important is that you're almost on top of the parchment paper. You're gonna squeeze from the top, not the side, we're not milking a cow, squeeze, release, and then slide off, squeeze, release, slide off. And when you slide off, release, I am at the same level I was when I was piping. There's no lifting the piping bag.

So, all right, so now let me show you what I don't want you to do. I don't want you to squeeze and lift because these little top knots are gonna be difficult to get rid of. The other thing I don't want you to do is beehive. Air pockets are the enemy of macarons, and I don't want to risk an air pocket with a little beehive. And when you beehive, we end up with a little top knot on top.

So, get this out of the way, and we're gonna move over here and we're gonna start piping. Now, this makes a pretty average size macaron. And our objective is to almost fill the circles but not quite. And look at the way I've positioned my baking sheet. And as just a note, you wanna use heavy duty restaurant grade baking sheets.

And what I mean by that, they're nice and sturdy aluminum, good heat conductors, not anything flimsy, your macarons won't work out. Now I've positioned my baking tray so that I can pipe from the center toward myself and then spin the tray and repeat the process. And that's very important. We never really wanna be leaning over our work and dragging our sleeves. So, it's a really good technique, especially when you're starting out piping.

Again, I'm almost filling the circle, but not quite, try to leave a little bit of a border. And if you find, when you slide off, if you have a little bit of a extra batter, you can pull back and off. You can pull the bag towards yourself and then forward, I'm gonna go ahead and finish piping this tray, and then we'll go onto the next step. Now we've piped our tray of macarons and we have one more step. Even though we worked really hard to knock out all that air, we still have to knock out a little bit more.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick up the tray, you need to lift it at least six to eight inches above your work surface. Make sure your hands are not underneath. My thumbs are on top of the parchment paper, and, and again, be angry. We need to knock out that air. Now, you're gonna fist bump it.

one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, it's physics. We're gonna knock the air out from the top and we're gonna knock the air out from the bottom. Now they need to dry and they need to dry until they look dull. And depending where you are, this can take 15 minutes in a really dry climate, and up to 35 to 40 minutes, if you live where there's a lot of moisture. A little trick that I like to do is I like to write the time that my macaron started drying.

And then that gives me a ballpark. I have never dried them longer than an hour. I live in Los Angeles and they're usually ready to go in about 20, 25 minutes. Don't cover them, just set them where they're not going to be disturbed. And we will show you exactly what they look like when they're ready to go in the oven.

The reason they need to, I don't really like to say form a skin because I feel that's misleading, then we start to look for something a little thicker, but the top of the macaron begins to firm up a little bit so that when they go in the oven, the steam that's created from the moisture in the macaron batter begins to escape. So as it escapes, it's going to lift our cookie. If we don't have a little bit of surface tension on the top and drying out the macaron creates that surface tension, they are going to crack, and there's nothing sadder, some of you may have had this experience of opening that oven door and seeing a tray of cracked macarons. So, we'll give these about 20 minutes and we'll check them and we'll see what they look like when we come back. It's been about 20 minutes since I piped the first tray.

And this tray was piped about five minutes after. I want you to take careful notice of the first tray and how it looks dull, but not dry. And the second tray still has a little bit of shine on the surface of the macarons. This one is ready for the oven, this one is not, we're gonna put it to the side, give it about five more minutes, and then it's going to look just like this one. I'm gonna go ahead and put this in the oven.

One of the most difficult things with macarons is to tell whether or not they're ready. Are they done? Is it done? Well one of the telltale signs that your macarons may need a little bit more time is you take the tray out of the oven, make sure you've got towels or gloves. And if you can slide the top back and forth, that means they need at least two more minutes.

Now we bake our macarons at 330 degrees Fahrenheit, which what that means, if you have a dial oven, your temperature is between 325 and 350. You can, they can be baked the lowest at 325, but no higher than 330 degrees. And these need about two more minutes because they're doing that little slide. So I'm gonna go ahead and put them back in the oven and then we'll look at them again when they're done and finished. These macarons have baked for about 11 minutes at 330 degrees.

Now, remember, everybody's oven is different, your macarons may take a minute or two longer, but these macarons are perfectly baked. These macarons are over baked. And I wanna talk a little bit about the differences and how you know when your macarons are baked perfectly. In the recipe, in your course materials, I recommend that you start checking your macarons that are this size at the 11 minute mark, they rarely take longer than 13 minutes at 330 degrees. But remember everybody's oven is different.

So when your macarons are perfectly baked, they lift easily off the parchment paper and in the little foot, it does not look wet nor does it look overly dry, all right? And by the way, the anatomy of a macaron, the top is called the shell, and this little frilly part is called the foot or the PA, off front say. All right, so these are perfect. And also when you break one open, they should be crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. So now I wanna show you what happens when they stay in the oven just a little bit too long.

You can see where they've begun to take on some color. They look a little bit toasted. They release easily from the paper, and you can see where the foot looks pretty dried out. And when they're really over-baked and you break them in half, they just shatter. So, and you'll hear it.

So these are slightly over baked and these are perfectly baked. So that's what you're looking for when you're baking your macarons.