Strawberry Macarons | Which baking mat is BEST to use?

Hello sugar lovers Liz, here today we are going to make

strawberry

flavored French

macarons

, but most importantly we are going to find out

which

mate is

best

for making French

macarons

. I honestly have no idea what's going to happen, but we'll find out next with sugar. geek show, okay, so the first thing we are going to do is talk about our ingredients, there are not many ingredients in macarons, so these ingredients are extremely important, each one has a very important job, so first let's talk about the egg whites we are using. fresh aged egg whites fresh means fresh out of the shell, so it's more important to crack the eggs and use the whites and then put them in a bowl, cover them with plastic wrap and poke small holes in the top. and what this does is it allows the extra liquid to evaporate and you're just left with the egg white part, the protein part, and it makes the macaroni a little bit stronger, so it's like every little bit of these things had a one percent chance. of macarons are more successful and we want that one percent, so we are going to try all the things that people say to do to make their macarons more successful, so the first step is fresh aged egg whites, not pasteurized Pasteurized egg whites are heat treated and this breaks down the protein, making them less likely to turn into a meringue.

There is always one person who says I use prostitutes and it worked very well for you. The chances of that happening are very low and it even says on the side of the box. It is not good for meringue because the protein is very weak. I should also mention that when you are breaking the egg whites you should make sure to break each egg into its own bowl in case the yolk breaks and you don't want to ruin it. your entire batch of egg whites and then use the egg yolk for lemon curd or creme brulee or creme brulee lemon curry, you just want to make sure there isn't a speck of egg yolk in those whites because even a tiny speck It can ruin your meringue and it won't whip to stiff peaks no matter what you try.

Secondly, you need to make sure you weigh the egg whites, so depending on where you are from or if you live in the country like I used to. Eggs come in different sizes and egg whites come in different sizes, so we're going to use ounces, one egg white equals one ounce and while we're talking about measuring by weight, you actually want to measure everything by weight, flour almonds and powdered sugar. It's all by weight down to the gram, so we're using a handy dandy scale to measure all of our ingredients. If you need more information on how to use a kitchen scale, you can watch the video I made on that one, don't ask. me about the cups, okay, I swear we're going to make macarons at some point, but this is important information you need to know, I swear, if you don't want to hear this, you can click click on ahead, I won't blame you , so that brings us to almond flour uh people ask me if they can use almond flour, yes you can, but you'll have to grind it to a finer texture in a food processor,

which

I did in my last video in the chocolate macaroons video, but I found out that if you use Bob's Red Mill super fine almond flour like that, you don't even need to grind it, it's already ground to a very fine powder, this is just pure almonds, yes almonds blanched, oh I should mention that you can use um, something besides almonds, if you have a nut intolerance, I read that you can actually use pumpkin seeds, it's a very similar texture, their oil content is very similar, you just have You have to grind it into your own flour, unless pumpkin seed flour is available.

I could or maybe sunflower seeds, so that's great. The great thing about French macarons is that they are naturally gluten-free. If you are allergic to sugar, this is not the cookie for you. There is nothing special about powdered sugar, as long as it is powdered, it is good. I prefer to flavor my macarons with emulsion, not extract, because it actually has a stronger flavor and sometimes has color, so you can kill two birds with one stone. This is the Lorraine Oil

strawberry

emulsion, but I also really like the Amaretti wild strawberry emulsion, but it's very expensive, so I'm using this one and then we have some cream of tartar, which is actually something that makes it the egg whites are stronger.

Technically, you could get away with not using this, but there's a one percent chance these macarons will turn out. It comes out better if we use cream of tartar, so we use that and then we have our regular granulated sugar, which adds a little more sweetness to the cookie and also helps make our meringue nice and stiff. I'm using a Kitchenaid mixer to make. my macarons because my bosch is huge so unless I'm making a quadruple batch of macarons it's a bit, the bowl is too big for what I need so I like to make my macarons and a kitchen mixer.

I normally use a glass container but I broke it on like the saddest day of my life, so we're using my metal container. You don't want to use a plastic container if you're not using a Kitchenaid mixer. The plastic holds the oil and butter and then that gets into the egg whites and can prevent them from developing, so you want a nice stainless steel metal container and a metal attachment, so this is white vinegar and it helps clean your utensils of any type of grease, so I'm Just wet a paper towel and a little bit of white vinegar, it smells delicious and I'm going to clean all my accessories, so now that we have everything prepared, the measured equipment ready to use , we will begin to sift what you want to take. your almond flour and your powdered sugar and we want to run this through a sieve to remove any hard lumps now if there are any big chunks like powdered sugar or just things that are a little stuck together and that doesn't count as a hard lump which is like it's stuck together, so you can break it up with your finger, we just don't want big chunks of hard sugar, we don't want big chunks of almonds that have randomly gotten in, this is especially important if you're using almond flour and you just want to discard those.

I've heard conflicting information about whether you need to replace that amount of almond flour that has been discarded. I would say it's a lot like if you just have tons and tons of chunks, then you might want to replace them with a little more almond flour and then reweigh them to make sure you have the right amount, but if it's just a little bit, no Don't worry, I'm also making a double batch, so if you want to make yours at home and you think Liz had a lot more almond flour and powdered sugar than me, it's because I want all the macarons, so I have some lumps and The lumps here are mostly powdered sugar, a couple of little hard bits that you can see.

Can you see that big piece of almond right there? So if I were to leave them there, they would appear on the surface of our macarons and they won't be shiny, so now we're going to sift for the second time just the

best

practices. This also lightens the mixture so it is easier to incorporate into the beaten egg whites. They are like little clouds. It's really beautiful. Makes it rain powdered sugar. almond flour and look we didn't really have any lumps that time so we're good and then you sift a third time just kidding okay so let's whip up our meringue.

I'm using my metal bowl, my metal whisk and we're using. our egg whites and a stand mixer come here, Oscar, okay, first we're going to add our egg whites. Room temperature egg whites whip better than cold egg whites. I'm using a stand mixer, but in theory you could use a hand mixer. but it would take forever to reach peak so if you can use a stand mixer it will help. I'm going to beat this until they're foamy, once they have bigger bubbles we can start sprinkling. In our sugar, you want to sprinkle it in slowly, which helps the sugar dissolve into the egg whites, which is important for the cream of tartar all at once.

We're going to beat this until we see thick, shiny peaks. This may take a few minutes. Let's talk about this consistency. I used to think these were stiff peaks, they're kind of standing up and holding their shape, but they're definitely not, it's not thick, the bubbles and meringue are still pretty big, it's more like the consistency of shampoo. we foam so we want it to be very very thick if you take this whisk and push it into the bowl it's very easy to move it feels very thin it has to keep working well I can definitely feel this getting thicker rigid. the meringue is starting to pool inside the beater it's still shiny i would just like to do that test i don't want to hold it over my head i'm afraid i feel like it's still a little soft because the wood in the middle gets thicker before the outside does though that the middle feels pretty stiff, the outside is not, so I'm just going to give it a couple of little hand mixes to bring that outside to the inside and we're going to add our emulsion, if you're going to add any food coloring or any Another thing, now is the time, so before you lift this I just want you to look and see how the meringue has really started to build up on the inside of the whisk, so that's a sign. that's basically done it's still shiny it doesn't look crumbly or dry let's see how it feels it's definitely stiff enough like that's not going anywhere I can just feel it's slimy like it's hard it's harder for my beater to go through this no it feels not soft at all that's very it stays upright it's a very stiff peak i'm just mixing this with my hand and as i do it i feel it getting softer making sure everything is constantly the same thickness a lot of chefs say to finish it off by hand like this, it looks beautiful, look, this is a very common place for people to have problems, not knowing how stiff their meringue should be, they are very afraid of over-beating, so then they don't. whip and that is what causes hollow shells, if you have a hollow shell, don't panic.

I pay five dollars a macaron and some bakeries still have a hollow shell, so don't feel like you've failed just because you have a whole shell. It just happens that sometimes they are very delicate cookies and still taste delicious. Tell me what macaron disasters you've had and I'll try to help you fix them. Leave them in the comments, so what are we going to do? Let's add 1 3 of our almond mixture to the meringue and this just starts the emulsifying process? If I just dumped all this flour into the meringue and started mixing, then you would definitely overmix, you have these big ones.

It builds up dry pockets and things like that, so we're going to temper the meringue with the flower and then we're just going to fold. The fold is when you go around the outside of the meringue and make it look like a washing machine. so we don't really want to damage this meringue at all, it looks like it's doing nothing, but it is. I'm just using my spatula to go under the meringue, lift it up, flip it, try not to hurt it, cut it. Once now what we have is a lot of meringue with a little bit of almond flour and it's not evenly distributed so now I'm going to add the rest of my flour so the first thing we're going to do is focus on just incorporating the flower into the meringue folding, don't worry about anything else right now, this is where you train your arm to really regret those two pound dumbbells in jazzercise yesterday, now we have a weird, very lumpy mass, but that's it. incorporated, so now the next step is to take it to the tape stage.

See, the tape stage is when you do like this. Okay, so the ribbon stage is when the dough falls off the spatula and you can make a figure eight with the dough ribbon to To get to the ribbon stage, we need to get some of this air out, so we'll hold our flat spatula and we'll rotate it, we'll do that a couple of times and then underneath it'll start to look like lava, it'll start oozing out and it'll look very fluid. It looks more cohesive, however if at this stage your dough looks very watery or broken, you may not have beaten the egg whites correctly and unfortunately all you can do is start over by doing this very carefully.

You have to be gentle with your macaroni dough it's always a little proof this is not a ribbon but it's just falling out in a clump yes if you've watched enough recipe videos like I have some people have exact amounts of turns and they like all these really specific things that Try It, but for me it just depends on how much liquid is in the egg whites and how moist it is that day. How old are the eggs? There are so many things that can affect them. Well, this is starting to get a little more consistent. we're looking for, oh, okay, I'm very, very close to being able to do a figure eight, look at how it runs on a strip like that, there we go, there you go.

I'm going to say it's probably pretty close.Look, it oozes like lava, it's nice and shiny, just scoop out any kind of stuff from the bottom, make sure you mix it in a piping bag. We'll go. I have an 804, just a medium round nib, it doesn't really matter what. The size is fine, so first I'm going to put my dough in my piping bag. I feel like the dough is starting to get a strange consistency after it sits, so I want to make sure I get everything out at the same time, so let's go. let's talk about our pans real quick.

I'm using this mat which has little ridges that supposedly make it easier to hold on your feet and to keep it's shape we have a regular silicone mat which is although they are flat, quite large so I'll have them try to make them all the same size and then what I always use is parchment paper with a template. I think the parchment will still work better, but we'll see. Okay, I'm going to glue my parchment with just a little bit of macaroni dough and when you're making macaroni you want to make sure you're holding the bags up and down and you only want to put about three quarters of it down. out of the way and then when you hit the pan on the table, they spread more.

Don't do this when the baby is sleeping so you can see some little bubbles bursting. In fact, I can see some bubbles rising to the surface and then you can come. come in and sit here and pop any kind of bubbles that you see under the surface because not only do they cause problems during

baking

of that big bubble, but they can also cause cracks, but they also make the surface of your macaroon not pretty and remember even if they don't look perfect, they will still be delicious now that they are tubed. I really want to get my template out.

The paper can change the way they bake so now I'll set them aside to dry while I take out my others, so depending on how moist it is this could take 15 minutes if it's very dry in your area or It might take you like an hour, so you just want to let them dry until you can touch them and feel like it. This leathery skin on top has a texture that is not sticky. I forgot to mention that it's important to pipe up and down so that you have an even amount of dough on all sides so your macarons don't rise unevenly.

Let me know in the comments which one. you think it will turn out better by making bets. I got this from Amazon, but I think any macaroni mat with the guides would work great. One of the problems people have is that the macarons stick to the parchment paper, in which case that just means that your macarons aren't baked enough or they're basically too wet and um, so you can always bake them for a minute longer, They should come off the parchment paper very easily, now we're going to try this guy, yes, there are There are a lot of stains on this one, that's quite pretty.

I wonder if this little ridge will leave a stain on the bottom. I guess that doesn't really matter if you want to add sprinkles to your macarons. This is when you do it. They have to be um non perelles or jimmies um if they are metallic sprinkles, they heat up and then they melt on the top of your macarons, guess how I figured that out, so now I'm going to put them here until it develops a nice leathery texture. The skin made my heater make the air warmer because it is very humid today and hopefully in 20 minutes we will have macarons ready to go in the oven while we do a little research on brownies and how brownies get that crunchy texture.

I learned that. when you beat eggs and sugar, that's what actually develops that shell, so it's very important to beat those meringues to a stiff peak because it develops a very thick meringue shell. Well, we have skin that has developed. On top of these guys, that means when we put them in the oven and they start to bake, the skin will trap all that air, lift up the macaron cookie, causing those beautiful little feet around the bottom to bake in the oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for about 15 minutes or until they start to lightly brown on the edges, these guys are a little smaller so I'll bake them for 10, but if they were larger macarons you'll want to get closer to 15.

They should remove the parchment or the silicone mat easily at the moment of truth, okay, all of our macarons are baked, we have the silicone mat, the parchment and then the silicone mat with the ridges. What I noticed first is that most of them. They turned out great, no cracks, no splitting, no feet exploding anyway so that's proof we mixed them correctly and I never use silicone mats so I'm really surprised they turned out so well , maybe it's because this is a special silicone mat just for macarons, but they are perfectly uniform, each and every one of them rose perfectly, except this one, which could just be because it wasn't mixed well, um, but they are all really cute like really cute feet and it releases super well with a really smooth shiny back it doesn't stick or crack if the macarons stick to the mat they might not be baked enough and then the parchment paper which It's what I usually use, I feel like it didn't work that well. normally all my macarons on this side and this side fell and collapsed and that could have been from the parchment paper lifting up on the edges it could have been from uneven cooking but I mean otherwise the ones on the Medium have a nice, soft texture. nice feet bottoms definitely don't fail this mat here caused me the most problems and I didn't really understand why I could have bought a cheap one but all of these sides curled during

baking

so all of the sides collapsed and were it fell which is really sad, you know what it could be, this mat might be a little too big for this pan so it wasn't completely fat so it's probably my fault you need to make sure you let them cool. five or ten minutes before trying to remove them from the silicone mat or parchment because they will stick and break if you try to remove them while they are still warm as far as the cookie is concerned, so they don't even brown at all on the bottom, so I feel like this maybe isolated it and possibly it needed a little more baking because they're sticking yeah I definitely bake longer on these thicker mats literally every single one of these is stuck oh there's one that I took one off.

Well, we have a pair in two different sizes. I'm filling these guys, which is a vanilla Italian meringue that tastes super delicious with French macarons. You can fill the macarons with American buttercream ganache with curd. I mean, that's where they get all their flavor from. You can get creative if you want some ideas to flavor your macarons, go ahead and check out my filling and frosting recipes at sugargeekshow.com. All the results were good. I think this was my winner, mainly because it was so easy to use. All the macarons were perfect. It has the guide built in, so I don't have to put the template under the parchment paper.

I don't have to glue the edges. I think one of the reasons this worked well is because it is actually a silicone baking mat. not just thick silicone, there's plenty of room around the outside edge, it fits perfectly in my pan come on, and the guides are evenly spaced so it's like someone knew what they were doing when they made this, I think this might have been mistake user feedback that it doesn't fit my pan very well, which I would say is a disadvantage as I don't want to have special pans for my mat, so this mat is a little too wide, so it doesn't fit the right way. everything in my pan very well the macarons stuck very poorly and it could just be this brand so I'm just saying this particular brand didn't work for me and they stuck very poorly and then there's my parchment paper which I really wanted I won but, unfortunately I mean there is no comparison, the silicone worked much better than the parchment paper and half of my macarons fell out because I think my parchment paper stood up so the silicone wins.

The good news is that they all taste the same in the mouth. Strawberries are so good if you put them in the refrigerator and let them age overnight, they get even better, they get chewier, the flavor develops even more, so definitely put them in the refrigerator and let them age overnight. You can also freeze them, take the peels and put them in an airtight place. containers, put them in the freezer, make a thousand of them all at once and then you will have French macarons whenever you want, that's it, that's all you need to know about using different types of maps to make French macarons if you want to see more videos.

Like this one, which I know you do, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. I'm Liz Merrick and I'll see you next time. Bye, I'm excited about sugar.