Claire’s Homemade Macarons Are Better Than Anything You Can Buy | Try This at Home | NYT Cooking

foreigner if I'm just going to say like macaroon or if I'm going to like the whole video like Parisian macaroon or something like that or macaroon but I think it's a macaroon hello everyone, I'm Claire saffets, I'm very excited to be in the nyt

cooking

studio For another episode of testing

this

at

home

today, we tackle one of the most delicate treats of all: baking French mackerel, those adorable little brightly colored sandwich cookies you see in fancy bakeries, here's how to make them at

home

, it's It's really fun, really unique, so I'm really excited to walk you through the whole process because now I have the perfect format to demystify it and make it a little less intimidating for home bakers.

The flavors of macaroni are truly endless. There are so many directions you can follow. Take it, but we're going to keep it really classic, we're going to start with chocolate, which I think is a great first macaroon to make at home if you've never made it before, and then we're going to use pistachio and raspberry, so these are kind of the standard trio that You will find them in many places, but once you have a good idea of ​​the technique and what you are looking for in the whole process, there are many others that you can do and show.

Let's get started. I like to use a stand mixer for

this

. You can use a hand mixer. It's a little more hands-on and labor-intensive. So I have some rimless baking sheets. You can use a space for the baking sheet and for most. During my testing I wore them, but eventually I started to turn them around. What can happen sometimes with the brim is that it can block some heat from circulating around those outer shells and that affects the feet that develop, so we're I'm going to talk all about the feet, what are our macaroni pies, how they are made and I recommend baking on a silicone baking mat.

If you're a casual macaron maker, use parchment, that's fine. A silicone baking mat is preferred because it will give you the flattest, even more circular Mac and roll and I have my guides below. I'm going to use a food processor, it's not 100 necessary, but I like to use it to bring all the dry ingredients together. A pastry bag fitted with a round pastry tip a strainer to sift everything together I highly recommend using a scale when you're making a macaroon because certain ingredient ratios are really crucial for this very simple recipe, although some granulated egg whites with sugar in powder that have been I weighed the cocoa powder because like I said, we're making chocolate with a little bit of granulated sugar and then most importantly, I have some almond flour here and this is super fine.

The first thing I'm going to do is combine my dry ingredient mixture to make it look. whether it's my cocoa powder, my almond flour and my powdered sugar and baking sugar, usually sugar is a wet ingredient, but in this case it's going to go with everything else, but I like the food processor because it tends to remove lumps and larger particles. very easy and it combines everything and I'm just pulsing until everything looks well combined and has a uniform color and now I'm going to sift everything, so sifting is important, the first thing I want to do is eliminate

anything

that's too big. lumps and particles because that's just going to create a texture that I don't want on the surface of my macaron and I just want everything to be very, very smooth.

Incorporated, it's important that you have a very, very uniform dough, so just working on a piece of parchment, so I'm left with some of these larger pieces with more pebbles in the strainer, as you can see, it's something that you can press and go Go ahead and discard the larger pieces which are usually like larger pieces of almond flour. I'm done with the food processor for now and now we're going to mix up our macaroni batter, so the first step is to make a meringue for most of the macaroni. If you want to whip a very, very firm meringue, that will give the batter some structure to hold its shape, which is necessary.

I'm making what's called French meringue, which is simply adding a little granulated sugar to the egg whites as you beat them, generally speaking, you want to work with room temperature egg whites because those are going to beat more steadily. , this recipe uses three egg whites, but more important than the amount of egg whites is the weight, so it's 90 grams, then I'll add half a teaspoon of salt, so I'll get started. to whip this up and when you're making meringue, that's why it's helpful to have a stand mixer. It's really

better

and you'll get that more stable type of meringue if you beat them relatively slowly and at this stage it's just to break up some of those egg whites now you might see some recipes where you just add the sugar from the beginning and that It's actually okay, but you also don't want to wait too long to add the sugar because you'll start making really big air bubbles and big air bubbles are like the enemy of mackerel batter.

I'm going to wait until I see it get a little white and foamy, which it's doing right now, and I'm going to increase the speed a little. a little bit and then I start adding sugar, so we're making this mixture of granulated sugar and then powdered sugar. I like to add maybe a slightly higher proportion of granulated sugar than you might see in other recipes because again it will help create that. egg white stability this isn't finished but I want to show you what it looks like at this stage this is like somewhere between soft and medium peaks we have a ways to go at this point so we're probably about two thirds done from there, but keep it at that medium, medium-high level.

I'm looking for the meringue to have very crisp marks from the beater, it will go from a shiny texture to a little more matte and will also start to pool on the inside. The whisk is a very important part if you also have some granulated sugar stuck on the side of the bowl. I would definitely pause and pick up the whisk and scrape it because you want the sugar to dissolve, look it's kind of firm. Now, if you're adding food coloring, which I don't because we're making chocolate so cocoa is the coloring agent, you'll want to add it now so you have a chance to whip it up.

I'd say you probably need it. 10 more seconds of whipping, you'll know if it's over-beaten if the egg whites start to look very, very dry, almost curdled, it looks like there's a separation, it's over-beaten, so this is a nice, super firm meringue, you can see it. get out of the end. that whisk is stuck up that's what you want this is a good sign like it's not going anywhere it's totally stuck to the bowl okay now we're ready for the macronach I have a big flexible spatula I have my dry ingredients sifted I'm coming Stop Start by adding about half of the dry ingredients to the bowl, mixing quite vigorously.

I really just want to incorporate all of that while still saying the term macronach, which is the name of the step where you're mixing the dough you want. To accomplish two things, you want everything mixed evenly and you want to deflate the meringue. I'm working the mixture against the side of the bowl and it's like squishing the meringue against the bowl which will help deflate it and pop out a lot of that air to get the rest of the dry ingredients in. You will find that the color at first will lighten a little, but as the dry ingredients hydrate, it will darken a little.

As you know? We are now done with macronach, which is a crucial step in mackerel processing. The most common term you see when making mackerel in recipes is lava, a lava-like consistency, I really know how useful that is because I don't know how many people have seen lava what. it really refers to this tendency to ooze but maintain its shape. Another telltale sign is that the dough will fall off the end of the spatula in a continuous ribbon, so it's like we're low right now because I'll see what happens. since it breaks and then falls so I need to continue, it really is mixed evenly so that's good but I'm still folding and scraping and as I bring the mixture in I press it against the side of the bowl but here's another test , make sure you have a plate with you, you can take a teaspoon of dough and you will get this kind of peak and keep an eye on it and in the next 10 seconds or so If that peak sits on the surface, then I know that I can move on to the next phase and that the macronach is ready.

You can see how it holds its shape. It's not like it's just flattening out, it's not flattening out, but it's kind of settling on the surface, so I think I'm a couple of strokes away from being done with macronage. I have my piping bag, maybe this is like a 3 8 3 8 inch round tip. I folded the sides down. I actually like to flip the tip. up like this, I don't know if you can see it and then put it in a tall container, this is a quart container because the dough is quite fluid so if the tip was upright it would start to leak out so I just do it. that to make a little bit of a plug, so here I have my rimmed baking sheet and I have my silicone baking mat underneath.

I have a piece of parchment, although where I traced quarter-inch circles with a permanent marker, I try not to do that. It forms big air pockets as you do this, which is why I took the time to fold up the sides of the piping bag. I have a dish towel right here, and I'll tell you why I have it, and I'm actually going to put it on. underneath and then I have a toothpick that I'll explain why lift the bag. I like to gather it right where the dough stops and starts to turn so turning it will help force it towards the end of that point and now I'm going to start piping the pipes what you want to do is place the pipes directly perpendicular and not at an angle .

Angled pipes can cause some problems later, such as uneven baking. We'll talk about it and squeeze gently until you're done. I filled all the circles, this is what it looks like, so I press evenly until it's full and then I do a little movement of the piping bag to break up the dough so I can move on to the next one, so again, piping side down, the dough will continue. to set and then spread a little in the oven so that the final macaron has a slightly larger diameter than the circles I have drawn, so you will see that I get a little bit of a point when piping, but after 10 seconds or so It starts to calm down, so that's what you're looking for.

I have three rows of five and then in between the rows two rows of four, so I like that because it helps me stagger the circles, which I think leads to

better

air circulation. them and more even baking, so that's the first sheet before moving on to put the second sheet and working quickly, you can see. I left that towel here. I'm going to use it as a sort of landing pad to tap my baking sheet firmly on the surface a few times. This will do two things: it will help pop any large air bubbles near the surface and help bring out the larger ones underneath.

It will also help the circles settle and even out, so I'm going to set this aside and I'm going to come back to that and bring in the chopsticks. I'm going to slide that parchment template out from under the first one. Now what I do is take my toothpick. You can use it. a cake tester,

anything

like a little skewer and I go in and pop the really big bubbles that are under the surface and you can see there's a little hole and then once they've been drying out a little bit, sometimes they don't always fill back up, so I'll use the toothpick to fill that hole and if there are any other little pockmarks left by the popped bubbles, I can fill those in too, obviously, I love this part, I think I was doing. the mistake at the beginning of the test was like going crazy popping air bubbles, there are air bubbles here, that's the point, you know it's meringue, you just don't want anything that's really really big and expanding too quickly. the oven and possibly cracking the shells, what you don't want to do is spend so much time popping bubbles that they start to set and you're creating more surface texture than you're actually resolving by popping them, so I'm going to go.

Go ahead and stop the next step is particularly important. I want to emphasize that this is letting them dry basically at room temperature, so what we want to do is allow a skin to form, that surface of the meringue will dehydrate a little bit and form a skin and then when they go in, they go in the oven, there's still moisture there that needs to escape, that you are going to stick to the baking mat, the surface will remain intact because it has already started to dehydrate and the moisture is leaving to escape out the bottom and form this little foot, which is the telltale sign of a well made macaron, if you don't dry them enough the moisture will end up escaping through the surface of the meringue instead of the bottom and you get like a cracked dome shaped bottom that doesn't have a foot, set them aside, preheat the oven, we will go back a little andWe will do a skin test so that after almost an hour of rest, they are ready to go.

I went ahead and touched that little test shell I had on my plate. She had nice thick skin that with a little pressure didn't give. It was nice and firm around the edge, so these are going to go in the oven and I'm going to show you that after about 15 minutes of baking I'm going to do a little test to see if they're done, so there's this paw formation that happens on the oven and you have this.nice soft shell and a little frilly foot around the bottom, what I'm going to do is grab the shell, give it a little gentle movement and if it moves it's independent of the foot that stays in its place place, it needs to bake a little longer when I move it, it just stays still and is firmly anchored to that foot and then it's done while the chocolate shells cool.

I'm going to make the filling, so I opted to make something pretty simple. It's kind of like mixing ganache fillings for macaron, because you've already been through the trials and tribulations of the shells. I don't really feel like making a buttercream, so ganache is a really simple, rich, easy, intensely flavored filling, perfect for chocolate macaroons, so the process is very quick. I have four ounces of dark chocolate here. When you're making chocolate ganache, you really don't want to go over 68 chocolate in terms of cocoa percentage, that percentage has a tendency to break or taste. separate it when you're making the ganache and you'll get this kind of broken up oily mixture so you don't want that so I like something in the 60 to 64 range and I'm not going to add any sugar because I want a pretty bitter taste. ganache to help offset some of the sweetness of the meringue shells so four ounces I'm finally going to chop it up, it's a little broken up and I'm just chopping it up so it melts relatively quickly and evenly so having everything that extra surface area will help, so I'm going to add that this is an optional ingredient, it's just a half teaspoon of espresso powder to enhance the chocolate flavor and then a pinch of salt and then about a teaspoon of vanilla extract, so then four ounces or about half a cup of heavy cream will go into a small saucepan, it's very simple, we'll just take that hot cream and pour it over the chocolate.

I don't want the cream to boil too vigorously and I don't want it to be too hot when I pour it in so I like to take it and shake it to even out the temperature throughout and it will instantly start to melt the chocolate so I give it a brief stir to make sure the chocolate is dipped and then I'll let it sit for about a minute so the chocolate has a chance to melt gently and then I'll stir it in and I love the transformation that happens with the ganache. It goes from this kind of mess that looks like broken liquid to this thick, shiny, incredibly lush chocolate mixture, that's the filling you want, just let it sit at room temperature and stir it from time to time and it will settle and kind of get to that point. where the texture holds its shape and that's when we can start to channel it and fill the mackerel.

I let the chocolate shells cool, which is really satisfying and a sign that they are baked properly is that I have this. Really smooth baked surface that peeled off the silicone baking mat very easily. I match them even though I had those templates, they come out in different sizes, often the ones along the edge of the baking sheet come out a little larger and spread out. more than the center ones just because of the way they hit on the counter, you certainly want to overbake them, but overbaking them is preferable to overbaking them because they're going to hydrate and actually age them. or sit in the refrigerator for about 24 hours and during that time the shell draws hydration and moisture from the filling and that's how you get that really chewy texture.

They are ready, they are filled. Now I'm going to make a raspberry. and the pistachio and then when they're all assembled and ready, each macaroon goes into the refrigerator where they need to sit and age overnight to soften and then I'll show you what they look like when they're It's all done. I had a batch I made last night with all three flavors so we can take a look and try the foreign flavor. Now that you've seen the entire process from start to finish, this time I'll make a different flavor variation. When making a raspberry, the main difference is going to be that mixture of dry ingredients and the temperature of the oven, we don't have cocoa powder, instead we are adding free dried raspberries to that mixture of dry and I'm also going to add a little bit of food coloring in gel. and we are going to bake at a lower temperature because the dough with freeze-dried fruit has an excess of sugar that tends to brown at a lower temperature, we don't want the peel to have any color, so we are going to bake at like 275. the process it's really the same I'm going to start by combining my dried and this time I'm using the food processor to pulverize the freeze dried raspberries and we're going to sift them to remove the seeds so Adding this freeze dried raspberry powder will stain the peels a little bit but I want to give it a a little more color so that it has a kind of nice medium reddish pink, so adding freeze-dried fruit is a little controversial because they don't tend to change the behavior of the dough, it can make it take longer to dry and form that skin after place them as I can in Browning at a lower temperature, but I'm not going to add as much.

I'm adding like half a half hour. ounce about half a cup, so that's going to discard any raspberry particles, which will mostly be the seeds left in the strainer, and now I'm going to turn to my mixer and start whipping my meringue in a weird way. Because we are dyeing the shells, I stopped the mixer before that, as a firm, hard whipped peak stage, so the gel food coloring was really important because you don't want to introduce too much moisture into the macaroni batter, which can cause all kinds of problems during baking. Gel food coloring or even powder food coloring is best.

I tried it at home with regular food coloring to see if I could get away with it and it didn't work. I was getting a good result with a drop of pink and a drop of red. The color starts out very vibrant and will dull a bit in the oven, so keep that in mind. Now I'm making a white chocolate raspberry ganache as a filling for my raspberry macaroon. I'm going to start with six ounces. finely chopped white chocolate in a bowl three ounces of heavy cream and to the heavy cream I'm going to add some raspberry puree now to do that I'm just going to take some fresh raspberries.

I wanted fresh raspberry flavor here, not just jam, you could substitute raspberry jam for the ganache and just do that, but for me it was going to add too much sweetness, so I like to have a little bit of fresh fruit in there and I have like a little strainer of mesh here, so all I'm going to do is press the fruit through the strainer using like a flexible spatula, you can use the back of a spoon, it's cool to see it as a drop in the cream, go ahead and stir all that together. . I'm going to get this to come. until it simmers very, very gently on the stove and then to the white chocolate I'm just going to add the same thing I did for the chocolate ganache, a little bit of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt now that the white chocolate is melted because so much of it is like cocoa butter, it tends to become a little translucent and that, in addition to the slight pinkish tone, makes it a little grayish and even a little yellowish, but that will go away once it hardens, so don't worry for Color and again, if you don't like it, add just a little bit of red food coloring and then because there is such a high proportion of fat from the white chocolate here, it's actually better to harden it in the refrigerator, otherwise it just It can take forever at room temperature to make, so I'm going to stick it in the refrigerator and then we can pipe it when it's cold, moving on to our third flavor of macaroon, this one will be pistachio to flavor the shell.

I'm just going to grind up some whole pistachios along with some almond flour and my powdered sugar. The main difference here is that I'm going to sift and then re-grind the solids because I want as much pistachio as possible. incorporate it into the dough as much as possible and just like with the raspberry, I'm going to dye the shell because the ground pistachios just give it a very, very faint green color, so I have some green gel food coloring here to add a little extra flavor. I'm going to boost it with just a quarter teaspoon of almond extract so it follows the same matting process again here.

I probably have about three to four tablespoons of large particles that won't go through the strainer and these will go back in, so this is where you want to be careful not to process too much because I don't want the mixture to get oily. I'll do it one or two more times, sift and then grind again, so I have about a tablespoon left, that's fine. this is our dry mix, it's actually not a bad idea to sift it one more time just because it's not very evenly mixed, so it's always a good idea, the more evenly it is mixed before adding it to the dough, the more evenly your La will mix. dough will be another indicator of when you have completed the macaroni stage, which is often known as a figure eight and is where you basically have enough dough falling off the spatula and a ribbon so that you can make a figure eight inside the bowl, like Drag the dough, different recipes will require different amounts of mixture.

Pistachio macronach happens much faster than raspberry because that fruit powder tends to thicken it a bit, so rely on those indicators as much as you can during the process. The filling is pistachio, so I'm not going to make a ganache, but instead I'm making a pistachio cream again to give it all that richness and creaminess, but it has an intense pistachio flavor because I'm using pistachio paste, also called pistachio cream. pistachio, think about it. like sweetened nut butter, so I'm going to put this in a bowl. You can see it's quite runny at room temperature and I'm going to combine this with just a little bit of heavy cream, it's something I'm adding cream to. like lighten it up, but that happens strangely in baking sometimes, so I'm just going to whip this up until it's super smooth and all my ingredients are at room temperature, that's something important to mention here.

I have six tablespoons of butter at room temperature and for that. I'm going to add a pinch of salt, so I'm going to beat this with the paddle until it's light and creamy and smooth, so now basically what I want to do is beat the pistachio cream mixture. mix about a tablespoon at a time, so the idea here is that I'm just trying to introduce a little air into the mixture and lighten it and thicken it at the same time. If you're working in a warm kitchen, you may need to do this very briefly. Chill this mixture, but at room temperature it should be thick enough to pour.

If it seems a little runny and doesn't hold its shape, you can put it in the refrigerator for about five minutes and then blend it again. It's my pistachio filling mix. I'm going to put this in a piping bag just like I did with the other fillings. My shelves are cooled and now it's time for the fun part because all the hard work is done, we're going to fill them. I really wanted to be intentional about including some troubleshooting in this video. The first and most common problem you will probably have is a bulging and cracked shell.

This is actually very common. The most common culprit is that you didn't let them dry long enough. at room temperature before baking when you let it dry it forms that skin, the weak point is actually the perimeter around the base and that is what forms the foot, but when you don't let it dry enough the surface has weak spots and all the air. that is trapped in the dough expands upwards and leaks through the shell and not at the bottom to make the pie another common problem is that they brown a little so let's look at the color difference here is a shell properly baked here's one that got nice browned if you've ever made meringue for anything you know it's baked at a really low temperature and that's because at higher temperatures the meringue will brown very easily so this was baked with too high an attempt, so the next problem you may encounter There is unevenness in the formation of the foot, so here is a good example.

Here's one where it didn't have a foot here, but it had a big, overdeveloped foot on this side, so you can see that literal hole where the air escaped, so there might be some culprits here. One is that maybe you didn't place it evenly. I noticed, while I was piping sometimes, that the dough was sort of anchored in one spot on the parchment. Make sure you place the pipe down at a 90-degree angle perpendicular to the surface. make sure you are hitting the baking sheets fairly evenly, that you are not hitting one sideof the counter, everything is hitting the flat counter, it could also be that the heat of your oven is uneven and it is getting hot. exposed to a lot more heat on the back of the oven than the front or vice versa, this was a curveball for me, you can see this one has this kind of slightly wrinkled top, it's not perfectly smooth and has lost a little bit of its a dome which is probably due to too much mixing, it could also be due to a problem with the meringue, like maybe you beat it too much or didn't beat it well, it could also be underbaked a little.

These heads are quite small feet. something like a flat foot separation rather than a foot more like a parallel foot like I have here, this may be because the oven temperature is too low and vice versa if you have a very very prominent foot that is very high, it could be due to an oven temperature that is a little high, as you can see there are many different problems you can encounter and there are many reasons throughout the process why it could have gone wrong. I think those are the most important ones, I know. I'm missing all sorts of other problems but it's a good place to start.

I made all these

macarons

last night and filled them and they've been aging in the refrigerator so I want to show you what they look like. You can see I have a nice similar sized foot. the raspberry, but both the pistachio and the chocolate, which I baked at the same temperature, different oven, just had slightly smaller feet. I think it's kind of a range of what's acceptable feet-wise, like everything, from this to this, I think. That's what a successful macaron looks like, so know that there's always a little bit of variation, whatever it is, let's try them.

I know they will taste delicious. I love the texture, it's so chewy, but not like it's stuck to your teeth, it melts too. a little bit at the same time sweet but not too sweet with that little bit of almond extract, still it's much more pistachio type, it's so good, this is what I'm looking for when you fold it, you can't really tell where the shell ends and the filling begins. I like to see that kind of mixture of the shell and the filling. This to me is like a very, very shapely macaron, oh my goodness, the most satisfying texture, a very pronounced kind of pure raspberry flavor. like it really tastes like raspberry.

I feel like if you've never had macaroni before and are a new first-time taster, you'll understand why people are so passionate about making them at home and why it's a project that people would take on and I would. Also I just want to say that let's say you have a batch so the pie spreads or you don't have a pie, they brown or various things happen, go ahead and still make the sandwiches, make the filling, put them together, they are still going to taste great thanks . I think I've set you up for success if you want to try them at home.

I really think you should. They are exceptionally delicious, so thank you very much for watching and we will bring you more. episodes so stay tuned