- Hey bakers, John Kanell from Preppy Kitchen here.
Have you ever tried to make a macaron
and it comes out looking like this, or like this?
I have many times, many, many, many, many, many times
and it's very frustrating.
I learned all the wrong stuff the hard way
so that you can make macaron the right way
and end up with this pretty little French cookie.
Let's get started.
First off let's talk about the eggs.
This is a huge deal and there's a lot of opinions,
but I think the best practice
is to measure out your egg whites
and put them in a bowl the day before you want to do this.
Cover it with plastic wrap, poke big holes in it
and basically the egg whites will dehydrate
just a little bit.
You wanna get rid of some of the water.
Is this necessary?
No, you don't have to do it,
but, with these finicky little beasts,
you don't wanna take any chances.
Like you want to dot every i, cross every t,
so I measured out a hundred grams of egg whites yesterday,
covered them, put them in the fridge overnight
and then let them come back to room temperature
this morning.
100 grams of egg whites is kind of
like, a random thing to say for most of us in America,
especially, Murica.
But, it's precise for a reason.
These cookies need precise ratios
and you can't just say like, "Oh about three egg whites
"or about two egg whites kind of have to measure it out."
So a scale is gonna be a best practice, okay,
but, you know, about three eggs-ish,
if you don't have a scale.
I'm setting this aside.
Now it's time to talk about the dry ingredients.
I'm gonna measure out 130 grams of confectioner sugar,
130.
And 140 grams of almond flour.
Don't believe any of the labels.
I know there's like a lot of good brands of almond flour,
but they all say like,"Superfine almond flour."
Or like, you know, "Fine almond flour."
And if you just trust them and dump it in,
it's not gonna happen.
Yes, it's fine, but it needs to be like, pulverized fine.
So it's zero at the scale again, 140 grams please.
I say 140 grams, but I'm compensating
because, after you sift this stuff out,
you're gonna be throwing away a couple grams
of the big stuff.
I've measured it for you, knowing there would be some loss.
We're gonna sift this out into a bowl.
I'm excited 'cause today,
I get to use some of my copper stuff.
For a reason, 'cause copper is actually good
for whisking up egg whites
and I'm gonna do part of this by hand.
I didn't do any swimming yesterday,
'cause I know I need all my strength
for these macaron today.
Just patiently sift it out.
Don't try and grind things through,
just discard the big pieces,
'cause you're actually gonna be doing this a few times.
If you have giant lumps like this,
go ahead and break them up, that's fine,
but your goal is to get the small stuff,
not to force the big stuff through your sieve.
You can see out here, look at all this nonsense.
Most of you know that you would have to do this,
as a first step,
but I've been reading tons and tons and tons of recipes
and they all are so different, it's crazy.
Ok so you can see I have a lot of, it's like prospecting
for gold here except this is the trash.
You're the chaff.
And here I have a bunch of almonds,
let me actually weigh this out so you can see
how much I'm throwing away.
(upbeat music)
Eight grams, into the trash or your smoothie,
whichever one you want.
Now, we're gonna transfer this into a food processor
and whizz the heck out of it.
(dog barking)
Quiet Butch.
(plastic parts bumping)
Alright, just whizz it.
(food processor grinding)
Don't make almond batter, but you wanna really like,
grind the heck out of it.
(food processor grinding)
Don't put your fingers in here, ever.
(food processor buzzing)
And I like to give it a nice shake.
(liquid sloshing)
'Cause the superfine stuff goes to the bottom
and the top stays a little bit kind of like ruddy.
(food processor buzzing)
That was a nice start, pull it out carefully.
We're gonna sift it again.
The golden lining, silver lining?
Yeah, the silver lining of this whole process
is even if you screw up
and your cookies aren't picture perfect
which I'm gonna to tell you, is likely,
especially as your first time, they still taste delicious.
It was kind of galling through this process
because I would just be like making batch after batch
after batch with these like, various imperfections,
like they were cracked, they were flat,
the feet were fine, but they were angled out a bit too much.
Some of them were hollow,
some of them didn't have like surface imperfections.
Not usable for this video, this is like draft 20,
but they were all delicious, I loved the snacks.
So we're sifting it out again.
And here you can see, there's a lot less stuff inside.
It's all nice and powdery now,
except for some of the big pieces.
When I do this, I'm just breaking up some of the boulders
'cause they got mushed up in the food processor.
I'm not forcing out these big grains here.
I needed this one more time, but was it real quick.
(plastic parts bumping)
Do you think I'm crazy for doing this?
You wouldn't, if you know what I've been through.
Last sift.
The sifting part is totally the easy part.
The things that will take you all the way left
in like two seconds flat, are the meringue consistency
and the macaronage,
which is the mixing of the wet and dry ingredients.
The macaronage, that's not so bad.
The meringue, I had no idea, I can't wait to show you.
If you've had some crazy-looking macarons happen,
let me know in the comments.
Tell me what you think went wrong, I am all ears.
It's kind of nice to commiserate
about some things that went wrong.
Okay, couple lumps left over.
Those get tossed away and now my dry ingredients
will get set aside for later.
Now for the egg whites, first off, clean those bowls.
Remember, we're dotting all of our i's and crossing our t's.
I'm adding a splash of Vinegar, White Vinegar
and I'm just going to move it around.
This glass bowl is totally clean.
This one has a little bit of almond stuff in it.
We just need to remove any trace fats,
you want that meringue to be perfect.
This copper bowl, this copper bowl,
will get used to the end of the meringue making.
It's totally optional,
but I found you really wanna have a nice control
that you can't get very easily from your electric mixer,
you kind of have to like, feel it.
Feel the egg whites.
I have my piping bag fitted with a number 12 like,
a little round tip.
You can use a bigger one, but this is what I like
so have that set and ready to go.
100 grams of egg whites, room-temperature into our bowl.
Can they start low and when they get frothy,
I'll add in my 1/4 teaspoon of Cream of Tartar.
(whisking machine whirling)
Break 'em up.
(whirling intensifies)
Okay they're getting frothy.
I'm adding in 1/4 teaspoon of salt
and 1/4 teaspoon of Cream of Tartar.
(intense whirling)
Now I'm gonna drizzle in my sugar really slowly.
A fine gentle cascade.
(whisking machine whirling )
And it's best to use superfine sugar if you can find it,
otherwise, it's not the end of the world.
If you wanna make some really tasty
and very quick and easy
peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, click up here.
So fast, so foolproof.
(whisking machine whirling)
Let's talk about the meringue for a second.
This is clearly not even a soft peak yet.
It's looking nice but we need to get to firm peaks
like all the way firm,
they're gonna become almost marshmallowy, marshmallowy
which I didn't think was possible for a French meringue,
but it is.
(whisking machine whirling)
Once you have those soft peaks,
it's time to add in like, a teaspoon of vanilla
or whatever flavoring you're using.
(whirling stops)
Okay this is basically almost there.
Nice stiff peak.
You're gonna see that the meringue
is starting to kind of collect in the whisk attachment.
(upbeat music)
Very nice, oh,
almost there.
So I'm just gonna transfer this into my mixing bowl.
(kitchenware clanging)
Look how pretty that is, you see that, so nice.
This is where most people I think,
make their mistake with the meringue.
The problem is that it's not whipped thick enough,
so then after you do your mixing
and you make the batter and you think it's all perfect,
it gets too runny.
So you really want that batter
to be like, actually pretty stiff.
Because you're gonna have to tap, tap, tap, tap,
tap those air bubbles out and it's a whole deal.
I'm gonna use my copper whisk, so excited.
This whisk is normally just decorative kinda like copper,
but copper is excellent for whipping egg whites up.
So, let's finish this up.
(whisk whipping)
(whipping intensifies)
There we go, that's about right.
Do you see how pretty this is,
like this seems like it's an Italian meringue, almost,
so silky and strong, but it's a French meringue
and it just has to be whisked
and you have to incorporate that sugar the right way.
(intense whipping)
Okay, you can know that your meringue is done,
when you turn the bowl upside down and nothing comes out.
And you see these really, really stiff peaks.
It should feel almost like marshmallows I think.
(intense whipping)
There we go.
Do you see how pretty that is, that is crazy.
I wanna taste it but I'm not gonna do that.
Now we're gonna begin our macaronage.
Taking about 1/3 of a cup of my mixture
and gonna sprinkle that in and fold it in
to get this started.
Use your spatula and you're going to scoop from the bottom
of the bowl, and so you're kind of like, you're folding.
You're folding a mixture, most of you have folded before,
but you're going to scoop from underneath
and then fold in occasionally underneath, fold in.
It's a delicate balance because what you wanna do
is combine the wet and the dry mixture
and maintain a lot of those air bubbles,
but still not all the air bubbles.
It has to be the right balance.
So that's all folded in, now I'm gonna add the rest in.
Sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle.
I just realized something.
(laughs)
I was gonna make these pink,
but you're supposed to color in the the macarons
before you add in your almond paste.
Darn, you can see I'm scraping, I'm folding,
scraping and folding.
See that, that's not what you want,
you want there to be like a ripple that's gonna cascade,
cascading all the time, cascading.
You can basically cascade and blow back into itself slowly.
People call this like, the wet sand or the lava stage.
I'm adding in my food coloring now, just like a couple drops
of soft pink, they're weird drops.
Okay and now we can continue folding.
And once you have this incorporated, you can kind of like,
move things around a bit
and you're trying to get some of those air bubbles broken up
because if you have giant air bubbles in your mixture,
what'll happen is giant air bubbles in your macaron
and you'll have a hollow one which nobody wants.
You can see it's getting more flowy now
so it's starting to flow off,
but I wanna form a figure eight.
I'm actually gonna add in just another drop of pink.
This is not a best practice, you should have done this
when you had your meringue almost done.
Some people tell you to like,
measure the number of folds you're doing,
but I find that not to be the case.
You really wanna feel the consistency,
wait for it to be flowing properly and then stop
and immediately start piping.
We're almost there.
Okay let's see this figure eight.
One, there we go, that's a figure eight,
it's just about there.
If you see this here, I can form my figure eight, I'm done.
Put it down, walk away.
Don't walk away, that you have to start piping.
This is the cheat, I'm gonna be using the cheat
because even though I think of myself
as a good cake decorator, good quality piping skills,
the piping skills have to be on point for these guys.
If they're on point, you can use parchment paper
on a flat baking sheet.
For the parchment paper, just take a couple of dabs.
One, well four dabs
and you're going to just have a nice flat stable surface
for your parchment paper, it's gonna glue it down.
If you're using a Macaron sheet,
which has these little cheek wells,
then just flop it down, it's okay.
I'm gonna transfer my batter to a piping bag
but I'm not gonna transfer all the batter.
So you wanna pipe perpendicular to the surface
and then give it a little swirl to finish it off.
Put, put, put, put, put, put, put a little swirl.
These wells hold in your batter
and kind of fix a lot of sins.
I don't have a steady hand like, if you see my cakes,
they come up pretty well but my hands are shaky.
So basically it's really hard for me to get a perfect dot.
You don't wanna fill your piping bag up all the way,
because it's basically gonna force more of the batter out,
and it's gonna be harder for you to stop.
And let's keep drizzling out because gravity
is pulling all that batter down.
If you notice that your batter just keeps drizzling,
drizzling, drizzling out, you might have had meringue
that wasn't stiff enough or you over mixed.
You over mixed the batter, sorry, start over.
If you want, you can pipe smaller ones too.
It's totally up to you, some people pipe giant macaron
and as you get more advanced,
you can pipe little cartoon shapes,
hearts, whatever you want.
There's a whole like, art of macaron things,
if you look up things on Pintrest and on that Instagram.
Once you have one sheet all finished, it's time to tap.
Tap-a-tap-a-tapa.
So,
(sheet slamming)
by tap I mean, slam.
You can see those little air bubbles form in parts.
Change directions.
(sheet slamming)
You'll notice the macarons spread out too
and that happens, which is why you don't wanna pipe them
all the way to the edge,
or to as big a shape as you think they need to be.
And before we set these aside and let them age,
I'm gonna go to my crazy place
and pop some air bubbles with a toothpick.
We popped our air bubbles, they've been tapped,
they need to rest now, 45 minutes or so.
If it's really dry where you are,
they're gonna form a skin pretty quickly.
If it's really humid, you oughta wait a long time,
and then may be place it under your extractor,
kind of get some air movement on them.
You want them to have a nice skin
so you can actually touch them without marring the surface
and you'll notice that you can't like, press into them
as easily.
Once it gets to like, 30 minutes in, 40 minutes in,
I'll set my oven to about 320,
so then it'll be ready to go right in.
You're only gonna bake one sheet at a time
because if you get some weird airflow happening,
they are gonna form weird feet,
so they won't be perfectly rising.
My macaron are out of the oven and they're totally cool
to the touch now so, let's talk about what happened.
Here on this like, plastic rubber mat with the forms,
pretty good results, I got nice feet
and they all baked up pretty evenly.
On my other sheet, some of them were good,
like the ones in the center look really nice.
Some of the ones towards the edge I've already nibbled
on a few, it has this weird little divot here
and that's because I think, my oven is running
a little bit too hot
and it also has to do with my piping skills.
So partially piped incorrectly,
partially the ovens running a little bit hot.
You could fill these with anything you want.
A whipped Ganache, a regular or American buttercream,
a little dot of jam, the world is your oyster.
For me, I love like, beyond love,
a beautiful French buttercream, this is its natural color.
French buttercream is made with egg yolks
instead of egg whites
and it is it's pipeable custard, it's insane.
I think the color is beautiful,
but to match our pink macaron,
we're gonna dye this pink with some gel food coloring.
I'm using the same number 12 piping tip I used before,
I just washed it off.
You can use a larger circle if you want or a star tip,
doesn't matter, it's all personal taste after this.
Take your macaron, be gentle with it,
it's been through a lot, we all have.
There you go, one a macaron done, several to go.
This actually is delicious right now,
but you should let this hang out for a day to three
in the fridge.
What's gonna happen is, some of the moisture
from that buttercream or whatever filling you use,
will seep in to the shells and soften them a bit
so you'll have it crispy on the outside,
chewy on the inside, creamy in the middle situation.
That is what a classic macaron is all about.
If you eat them now, it's gonna be delicious
like, I'll eat one on camera for you
but, you should let them hang out in the fridge to mature
for a few days, just make sure they're refrigerated
and covered in a sealed container.
Time for a bite.
Mmm
Mmm-hmm.
They haven't even matured yet,
but they are like, nice and chewy on the outside
then a nice little crunch on the outside
and the creamy French buttercream, oh my God.
If you liked this video and you have a bunch of egg yolks
left over after making this egg white based cookie,
make my French buttercream.
Here's the full how-to video, click on it,
you will fall hard in love with it.
For something a little bit different,
how about my German chocolate cake?
It's chocolate, moist, tender cake
without that coconut dreamy frosting.
If you liked this video hit that like button and subscribe.
See you soon.