The French Macaron

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As we work on our Tea Room recipes, one of the things we've come to realize is that we create a lot of egg whites. Since we produce things like our own home-made mayonnaise or pastry cream, we use a lot of egg yolks leaving us with the whites. Over the past few weeks, we've been figuring out ways to make different types of meringues, but one of the meringues we were determined to experiment with is the French "Macarons".

Having spent a lot of time in France, we have very fond memories of the Macaron. In particular, we remember many mornings spent at the Place du Trocadero, within minutes of the Eiffel Tower, enjoying these delicacies at a pastry called Carette. We were later to find them in Switzerland where they were called "Luxemburgerli".

The French Macaron should not be confused with what we normally call a Macaroon in North America. It is not based on egg whites with coconut. The French Macaron is a more delicate meringue made with Almond flour.

Our first French Macaron

This week was our first attempt to make them so we thought we would share our recipes as well as the various things that can go wrong when making these.

The French Macaron is a delicate meringue sandwich. The interior can be a variety of things but is typically based on a flavoured butter cream. Usually the meringue is coloured to indicate the flavour. The key to it all is the meringue itself, and this is what we concentrated on.

So here's the basic recipe:

• 140 g of egg whites (we use a weight here since going by number of eggs could have an impact on the final product depending on the size of the eggs or the size of their yolks).
• 80 g of caster sugar
• 230 g of icing sugar
• 120 g of almond flour (the most expensive bit in this recipe)
• 2 g of salt

The process is straight forward, but there are quite a few tricks to pay attention to.

First you beat the egg whites with the caster sugar until they are stiff. You then add the icing sugar, salt and almond flour (making certain everything is well sifted). This is subsequently gently folded together. This is an important part of the process. Not folding all ingredients together well will not create a smooth "shell". Folding too much and the meringue will begin to sag and the macaron will cook flat.

Once the ingredients are well combined, we pipe the mixture onto a baking sheet. We then simply bake in a pre-heated 150 deg. C oven for about 20 minutes. The results are delicate cookie-like little meringues ready to form a sandwich.

Ready to be turned into delicate little sandwiches!

As you notice from the picture above, we discovered a few things in terms of what can go wrong in this process.

First, our objective is to create Ridge Berry Macarons (basically Macaron that highlight the various berry varieties on the farm, eg. raspberry, blackberry, haskap, black currant, etc.). To do this, the intend to colour and flavour the filling accordingly. As such, we attempted to colour these macaron by adding a food colouring. Our first mistake is that we added the colouring in the folding process. The results are the streaks like look like major cracks in some of the meringues.

Any dye or additional flavouring needs to be added when the egg whites are beaten.

The second problem is cracking of the meringue. This is avoided by slamming the baking tray down onto your table top to ensure the piped meringue is settled. Obviously in some cases we did not do this well enough.

Cracks resulting from not settling the meringue prior to baking.

 Finally, the easiest mistake to make is to take the Macaron out of the oven too early. Some Macarons may "peel off" the baking sheet rather well, but when they are taken out of the oven too early, you will find that for some the bottom will stick resulting in a disaster.

Just not yet fully cooked.

The ideal macaron peels off the baking sheet cleanly, has no cracks, retains a beautiful glossy shell and is not flat (it will rise with a "foot" on the base).

Just about right...although more of a "foot" would be nice.

In the end, we are quite pleased with the results....now it will be time to flavour these seasonally when we open the Tea Room. The likely first candidate will be a Maple Macaron (once we start tapping our trees this Spring).

Of course we did not stop at experimenting with Macarons. We also continue to work on our Pate a Choux. This week, it was time to extend our efforts by producing some Eclairs. We'll definitely share our recipes once we perfect this.

Our first Eclairs...not exactly great for the Winter waistline.

Finally. we'll close again this week with one of our glass gallery additions. This time it is a rather rare American piece produced in about 1920, in upstate New York by Steuben. The colour of the glass is called Plum Jade and it has been etched to produce the cameo of a Griffin. The pattern is called "Medieval".

Steuben Medieval Pattern Plum Jade Vase