- French macaron.
Very different than the macaroon with two O's.
Okay, that little coconutty lumpy thing.
We're gonna do pumpkin spice latte.
It's one of the most technical cookies known to man.
Everything we're gonna talk about
and all the macaron technique is all about texture.
Once you get that right,
you open up a whole universe of flavors.
Top to bottom, start to finish,
probably gonna take you about four or so hours.
Stick with us.
We're gonna walk you through everything
you need to know about mastering French macaron.
(French music)
So, for the French macaron, here's what we're covering.
Cookie base, baking,
ganache, or filling, assembling.
And we have even deeper content on ChefSteps
about every single one of these steps.
But, the key idea is, once you get the techniques down,
you can make any flavor you can dream up.
It's a really, really fun technical cookie to make.
We just happen to be making pumpkin spice,
latte French macaron.
Let's get into this one.
(French music)
It begins!
We're gonna make the cookie, the cookie base.
Matthew's got his station all laid out here.
Should we start with tant pour tant?
- Tant pour tant, you gotta start with tant pour tant.
- What the (beep) is tant pour tant?
You know, just a French word, part for part.
- Equal part, almond, flour, powdered sugar, sifted.
And then you add your dry food coloring.
- This is like one of those recipes, you know,
everybody's like, "Oh, why do you have a digital scale?
Why do you have to do digital scale?
Can you do volumetric?"
I feel like you could, but it's so precise
and so technical, I feel like you're
just gonna set yourself up
for disappointment and frustration.
Remember when we told you you can mess up
about a hundred of those steps?
I think by trying to do cups of measures
and tablespoons is a big way you could screw it up.
- For these cookies, for sure. - Yeah.
- [Matthew] I'm just gonna whisk this together
and then we can give it a second sift.
- Look how nice and fine it is.
That's how chefs really sift things.
(glass clinking)
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
- [Matthew] We're gonna divide the egg whites in halfs.
- Ooh!
What are you going for?
- 55 grams.
That's a good half.
So I've got the egg whites divided
and this portion of egg whites is gonna go
in the bottom of a clean and dry stand mixer bowl.
It's important to be clean and dry when making a meringue,
if you don't want any added fats.
So we're gonna add this into the tant pour tant
and color it.
- And again, just a reminder on the color,
you're gonna look at it and be like,
"Oh my god, it's so bright and crazy."
But you're gonna add a bunch
of super bright white foam to it
in the meringue then they're gonna bake.
So the color transforms over the whole process.
- [Matthew] So that's good.
Everything's incorporated.
- This is one of those critical control points.
To finish the cookie base,
you need to cook a syrup perfectly,
to just 244 Fahrenheit here.
And as that's happening, you're whipping these egg whites,
they're getting a little bit fluffy.
And then as soon as the syrup's done,
you start to drizzle in, that cooks the meringue,
stabilizes the meringue.
And then you gotta basically keep whipping this,
until it cools off a little bit and it's a bit more stable.
So this whole thing's nonstop here,
this whole process, Matthew's gonna show you.
But once you start this, you're committed.
- So we're making the syrup,
we've got the granulated sugar in the pot.
We're gonna add a small amount of water.
I like to add the water right around the edge of the sugar.
Nice, gentle, so no sugar goes up the side of the pan.
244 degrees Fahrenheit.
Again, not stirring.
And some mixing bowls, the whisk doesn't go down
to the very, very bottom.
So what you can do is just give the egg whites
a little mix by hand.
Make sure they're a little foamy and bubbly,
and that helps the mixer whip it into a peak.
I mean that's really all you need.
Just a little bit of volume there.
Start whipping this on high.
- [Grant] Matthew just set the temperature to 244.
- I'm gonna turn this off.
We're gonna remove the pro
or you want to just go down the side of the bowl.
- [Grant] So all that syrup is going
into the meringue not into the whisk.
- [Matthew] That is it.
- [Grant] Okay, this is home stretch.
Matthew's got this stiff almond paste
and he is got a very velvety, smooth delicate meringue
and you gotta get him to get along.
So this first scoop, you kind of have
to put some muscle into it.
And then as you add another scoop and another scoop,
you gotta be more delicate, little softer,
a little more folding.
- [Matthew] Folding is going around the outside
and then into the center.
- [Grant] Yeah and the goal is incorporating,
while maintaining as much air.
Matthew's got our base, our cookie dough,
our cookie batter, we gotta pipe it.
Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah.
- There's different size tips.
This is a, like a medium size tip.
- Check this out though.
I think we talked about this in the class.
You got your cookie here.
If you just start putting batter in,
it's gonna start pouring out here.
So give it a little twisteraroo,
when you push this in there, that's your stopper.
- And having a little vessel like this
to pour, put it into is a big help.
So folding the pastry bag over this container
is key two to keep the ends nice and clean.
All right, so I've already untwisted this
and pushed up a little bit of the batter into there,
but it's key to have this twisted
and sealed, so nothing can lose out the end there.
- [Grant] Boom, end of chapter one!
Next up is piping, drying, baking.
We're almost there.
Told you it's a long journey.
First chapter, done.
(French music)
Baking!
Where should we start Matthew?
- Making a stencil,
I think so. - Yes!
Two reasons, I think, you want stencils
or very consistent piping.
One, so they all bake the same time temperature
and they bake evenly.
Two, so they're really pretty.
You got two nice little rounds.
Nice little sandwich cookie.
On the website, in the class, we have a little print.
You can print these off.
You know, you can buy soak pads to have these.
These are a little bit big and we don't pipe on these,
but we put these under the paper,
so you can stencil on 'em, you know what I mean?
Let's pipe some cookies.
- All right, so we're gonna pipe.
Pressure, even pressure and to the center.
Once I hit that rim, I'm gonna give it a little twist off.
- [Grant] That twisting, you know,
or cutting is kind of important.
So whether you have like a polycarbonate plastic tip
or the smooth metal ones,
what you don't wanna do, if you go like, "Okay, I'm done."
You pull away.
See that?
So this little cutoff that'll smooth out, tap down,
but that like big old kiss that'll ever go away.
And you don't bang, you don't like banging?
- I don't personally like banging.
I like- - Let's talk about banging.
The banging settles the shell a little bit more.
We get a, what's it called, like liquifaction on the top?
So the nuts sink and the surface gets all smooth.
- [Matthew] Liquifaction. - [Grant] Liquifaction.
I'm gonna show you what I do for banging though.
This is all I do for a few of these.
And depending on how liquid the cookies are,
they can spread nice and even, nice and quick.
But, I find you end up with a cookie
that's a little bit more flat
with a little bit more square edge also.
So these corners in the oven, I just do like
a little bit of this and then press down.
Otherwise that parchment goes like this,
blows in the fan often.
Just a little bit of that batter
to glue down that corner, holds it there,
so the tray and the paper stays super flat.
Matthew's been using this pumpkin pie spice,
- Its so good. - from World Spice.
Our favorite spice friends, it's freaking delicious.
But you gotta do this when it's kind of,
the cookie's still kind of a little bit wet.
That's why I'm gonna just get on top of it here.
Here's the thing, once you pipe,
you have to let these hang out
and rest before you bake them.
If you bake 'em fresh right now,
the cookies gonna do one of these,
and just puff up like a regular ass cookie.
If you want them to rise and souffle,
vertically and nice and square,
so you get that foot, you get that nice macaron cookie,
you have to develop like a little crust
or a pellicle on the outside.
In baking, you call it case hardening.
So the exteriors dry, the pressure in the steam pressure
can't get through that.
So the pressure has to go somewhere
and the whole cookie lifts up.
But how do you know?
- [Matthew] You do not want this where it sticks.
You just wanna be able to gently, still gently touch it.
If it's dry, it has a pellicle,
you're ready to bake.
- Whatever oven you have.
We're gonna show a couple for you on.com.
We're gonna show all the different ovens,
cause it doesn't really matter.
You gotta dial in your own oven.
What's been your average time temperature
that you've been working with through these?
- For my success rate, it's a two temperature.
I start out a little bit higher, so I get a nice spring
and then I drop the temperature down.
I also start with a little bit of a fan
and then I turn the fan off after a few minutes.
- With these cookies, we're trying to souffle them
and get rid of a bunch of humidity in the oven,
cause as they puff they're gonna dump humidity.
But if you had a bunch of trays in the oven
and they're all dumping humidity,
what's gonna happen is they can soften up
and you lose a nice souffle too.
So, generally I like to bake one, two,
usually not more than two trays at a time,
depending on your oven.
- Let's go.
- Bada bada bah.
- Just monitor the cookies.
If they start to rise on one side,
you might want to think about just giving
it a slight rotation to kind of even out the rise.
There's always gonna be a couple cookies
that just don't make the cut.
Those are snacks.
(upbeat music)
Timer went off.
We already know that this is the right time.
We've tested out our cookies, so we're taking 'em out.
- [Grant] Coming in hot!
- So you gotta let 'em cool, before we fill 'em.
You wanna wait at least 20 minutes
to remove them from the parchment paper.
It could take upwards of an hour to completely cool.
- We can cover this while they're cooling
and just chat about it.
This is the cookie.
If you just pipe it and bake it, it swells up.
So as the foot's puffing out, the cap's also puffing out.
This one dried a little bit longer.
He also banged this one a little bit too.
So it's got a little bit flatter of a cap.
And then this one is kind of what you're going
for here on average, it's got a nice matte finish.
Still crispy, soufle's mostly puffs up.
All this has to do with that resting right before the oven.
This is what you're looking for.
So if you do this, your cookies done up like this.
They were too wet.
They need to dry longer or rest longer before they go in.
And this is almost there.
And this is pretty much, you know, spot on.
(French music)
All macarons need a filling.
That's where all the flavor comes from.
Again, on chefsteps.com, we can show you
how to make so many different types
of jams, caramels, we even do a corn caramel
or a corn ganache.
Right now Matthew's gonna walk you through exactly
how to make a pumpkin spice latte ganache.
- Ganache is a mixture of cream and chocolate.
We've got a nice white chocolate that has 35% coco butter.
So we're gonna start off by heating the cream,
liquid glucose and pumpkin puree.
We're gonna bring this mixture to a boil
and just stir it all together.
It should come to the boil
within about three to five minutes.
Then we'll add the rest of our ingredients
the white chocolate, the pumpkin spice,
the instant coffee and a little bit of salt.
And we're just gonna gently stir this,
until the chocolate is melted,
so I don't have any more white chocolate streaks
or lumps in there.
And once you get your ganache nice and smooth,
then you wanna pour it into a container or vessel to cool.
Right now it's very fluid and very hot,
so you can't fill a cookie with that.
So that's to set and cure.
We want to put a layer of film
or parchment on the top to minimize air contact.
Pop that in the cooler, takes about two hours to set.
We don't want a skin to develop.
(French music)
- We baked our cookies, Matthew baked them to perfection.
But the key thing here is,
cool to room temperature cookie,
pair 'em up, fill 'em, sammy them.
Then they gotta rest.
Hang out, melt, or sit until the next day either.
In like a safe, cozy environment,
so the textures can (whistles) become one.
- They are delicate cookies.
So when you fill them and press them together,
you just need to press them together gently.
- Not like this.
- You don't wanna smash 'em down.
You end up cracking one side or the other or both.
So we match up the cookies.
(knuckles crack)
(laughs)
- [Grant] If everything worked out,
they should kind of come off like this.
- [Matthew] Just like that, yeah.
- [Matthew] Like they're sticking, but barely.
And here's the other thing, how you know you did it right,
you look at the bottom and you see how this
is a smooth, smooth bottom.
You have a smooth working surface
to pipe your filling and set your filling.
That's when you nailed it.
Again, we talk about all these ins and outs
of troubleshooting on chefsteps.com, at the macaron class.
So let's match 'em up.
If you see this, its either slightly different size,
that's okay for the batch.
But if I put these cookies together,
Judy gets like crazy.
I know this is like not that big of a deal
but this would freak me out,
if somebody we gave me this macaron.
I'd get so upset,
like they don't even care about me.
See, so we just match 'em up,
that way each one is perfect.
It's not like the whole batch has to be identical.
They're all unique in their own way.
Once you have these pairs,
I just do this as like an assembly line style.
So I got my pairs and then a match, match, match, done.
- So we're assembling, we're gonna agitate the ganache,
just a little bit to thicken it up,
make it more pipeable.
Just give it a slight agitation,
just to where it's thick and pipeable.
And I think that's about it right there.
- [Grant] This is the one part of macaron that I like,
I don't measure, I just go by eye.
What I look for whenever I'm piping,
again, whether it's a jam, ganache, caramel, whatever,
I like to do a nice big ball that has round edges.
That way when I press the cookie
those round edges come out and it adds
to that like nice anatomy when you're looking at that.
The morphology of a macaron.
You can fix a lot too.
Like if I go, "Oh crap, that one's off center."
I can come back, separate this guy,
bring him back together so it's more centered.
Ooh, yep.
Just like that.
(upbeat music)
- So from here, you wanna chill 'em,
you wanna wrap em or put 'em in some kind
of a container that's protected from the airflow
in the refrigerator and from flavors coming in.
- We just finished assembling our fresh batch of macarons.
This is a rested one from a totally different batch,
but I just wanna show you,
like, if you make a bunch of these fresh ones
and you bite it or break it, I'll just show you breaking it.
Watch this.
So I break this guy.
See right off the bat, everything comes out the side.
It's not a bad cookie, but everything comes
out the side, kind of falls apart.
This one has a better bite to it,
where they come out more homogenous
as like an actual texture experience.
Basically, you just learned how
to make the ultimate French macaron.
These things are fricking epic.
They take a lot of practice to get down,
but even like little tiny detailed techniques,
all these different flavors, some variations,
troubleshooting, you can get all that at chefsteps.com.
We've got a whole macaron class,
that's been around for many years now.
We've actually got a really amazing community
in this class that's been around for probably,
like seven, eight years or so,
that they've been bouncing off ideas,
creating their own flavors.
That's it.
Ultimate French macaron.
Pumpkin spice latte this time!
Do you think the French hate us,
for pumpkin spice latting their beloved prize pastry?
Oh my god, I don't think it's either.
(French music)
Okay, true story, I've actually never
had a pumpkin spice latte.
(French music continues)
- Sweet?
- Holy god, that's sugary.
I'm done with this.