Featuring crisp, shiny shells sandwiching a luscious raspberry jam filling, these classy French macarons are sure to impress and delight anyone who tastes them.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 Hey everyone, it's Tia in the Delish Studio kitchen.
00:03 I'm gonna show you how to make French macaron.
00:06 Today, we are talking about those crisp, delicate,
00:11 gorgeous little French delicacies.
00:13 They have a reputation for being really tricky
00:16 and finicky to make.
00:17 They are a little tricky,
00:19 but they are definitely not something to stress out about.
00:21 We're gonna do it together today
00:23 and I'm gonna hold your hand the whole way.
00:26 So here we have all of the ingredients
00:28 that we are gonna need to make these macaron.
00:31 Almond flour, confectioner's sugar, egg whites,
00:34 granulated sugar, a little pinch of cream of tartar,
00:38 and then some food coloring, your choice.
00:41 Today, I'm using pink.
00:43 Couple very specific things before we get started.
00:46 Almond flour, you want to make sure
00:49 that you have super fine,
00:51 with the skins removed, almond flour.
00:54 You don't want any little flecks of almond skins in them.
00:59 You don't want them super coarse.
01:01 I honestly love Bob's Red Mill.
01:04 Blue Diamond is also great.
01:07 When it comes to your egg whites,
01:10 do not take the shortcut of buying that little carton
01:13 with the egg whites already separated.
01:16 They don't whip up.
01:17 Honestly, I've tried it and my meringues always go flat.
01:22 Do the extra work, separate the egg whites yourself.
01:25 One more thing.
01:26 You're gonna wanna make sure
01:28 when you measure out your ingredients
01:30 to measure them by weight.
01:31 Use a scale.
01:33 If you don't use a scale,
01:35 your measurements could be slightly off
01:38 and that's gonna destroy your chances
01:39 of those beautiful, crisp, shiny macarons
01:43 right from the get-go.
01:44 We're gonna start by sifting together
01:46 our confectioner's sugar and our almond flour
01:49 so that it's ready when our meringue is ready.
01:52 So you're just gonna use a fine mesh sieve
01:55 and add the almond flour
01:57 and the confectioner's sugar together.
01:59 If it doesn't all fit in at the beginning,
02:00 that's totally fine.
02:02 And then you're just gonna use a spoon or a fork
02:04 to kind of like get it in, get it to go through.
02:07 This could take a minute and that's fine,
02:09 but really make sure it's vitally important
02:12 because if you have clumps of almond flour or sugar
02:16 in the bowl, it's not gonna incorporate smoothly
02:19 and you are gonna wish you had.
02:21 So take this step, make it happen.
02:24 This may seem like a finicky little step,
02:26 but if you look at the difference between what's in the sieve
02:29 and what is in the bowl, that's a huge difference.
02:33 Look at how fine that is as opposed to this.
02:36 You may not be able to fit all of this
02:37 through the sieve into the bowl.
02:40 You might end up with like a tablespoon
02:41 of like the less finely ground, finely ground almonds
02:45 and that's fine.
02:46 You can just toss that away.
02:48 It should not be more than a tablespoon though.
02:50 You don't wanna throw off your measurement too much.
02:53 Now our almond flour and our confectioner's sugar
02:55 are sifted and ready to go.
02:57 We are gonna make our meringue.
02:59 Now with meringue, it's very important to make sure
03:03 that your bowl and your whisk are absolutely free of fat.
03:08 All right?
03:09 So take a paper towel, just like wipe it down, look at it.
03:14 The main reason is that if there's fat on the inside
03:16 of your bowl or your whisk,
03:18 your egg whites are not going to whip up properly.
03:22 We're gonna get our egg whites and our cream of tartar
03:24 into the mixing bowl and whisk on medium low speed
03:27 just until they're frothy.
03:29 This will take about 30 seconds to a minute.
03:32 At that point, we are going to increase the speed to medium
03:36 and start adding our granulated sugar
03:38 one tablespoon at a time.
03:41 You wanna wait between tablespoons
03:43 until the sugar is completely incorporated.
03:46 You'll know that it's time to add the next tablespoon
03:49 when you see those crystals dissolve into the egg froth,
03:52 I guess as it's called.
03:54 At that point, you can go into the next one.
03:56 Now all the sugar is incorporated.
03:58 It's time to kick up that speed to medium high
04:01 and whip it until you get a stiff peak.
04:04 All right.
04:05 So here we have peaks.
04:07 You can see that it is flopping over just slightly
04:11 and that's okay.
04:12 So now we have our whipped up meringue
04:15 and we have our almond flour confectioner sugar mixture
04:18 and we have our food coloring.
04:19 And the next thing we're gonna do
04:20 is combine them all together and fold them together
04:24 in what is called macaronage.
04:26 That's a very fancy word.
04:28 Basically what it means is that we're going to incorporate
04:30 this into this.
04:32 We're gonna do this in two steps.
04:35 So you're gonna take about half of it,
04:38 spoon it in and then use a rubber flexible spatula
04:43 just to fold it in super gently.
04:46 Once it's most of the way folded in,
04:48 you might still have a few streaks.
04:50 You can add your food coloring.
04:53 The food coloring that you use for macaron
04:55 is different than the basic food coloring
04:57 that you might pick up in the grocery store.
05:00 It's gel-based food coloring,
05:01 meaning that it's super concentrated,
05:03 but also that you don't use as much of it
05:06 to get the color that you need.
05:08 Since it is so concentrated,
05:09 we're only gonna use eight drops.
05:11 And the rest of the almond flour sugar mixture
05:14 and fold in again until it is just combined.
05:19 So you can see that I'm folding fairly gently.
05:21 We have our beautiful meringue
05:23 and we don't want to absolutely destroy it
05:25 and knock all of the air out of it.
05:27 But you do, funnily enough,
05:29 want to deflate it just enough to get to the right texture.
05:34 So moral of the story, fold gently,
05:38 but don't walk on eggshells.
05:40 Once the last bit of almond flour and food coloring
05:43 is all mixed in and incorporated,
05:46 now we get to the finicky stage, all right?
05:49 And this is probably the most difficult part
05:51 of macaron making is knowing when to stop folding.
05:55 Some recipes will tell you
05:57 to fold until the batter's like lava,
06:00 but do you know what lava looks like?
06:02 Actually, I kinda don't.
06:04 So I like this other trick,
06:07 which is to fold until the mixture can do a figure eight
06:11 off the end of your spatula.
06:13 So you can see here, if I lift up
06:16 and bring it off the end of my spatula,
06:19 you can get that curve, that gradual S curve.
06:23 We're gonna get our macaron batter into our piping bag.
06:27 So to pipe these macarons,
06:29 you're gonna want a half inch round tip, just like this.
06:33 And you can use plastic bag like this,
06:36 or you can use a reusable one.
06:39 Either way, the best way to get the batter into the bag
06:44 is to actually put the bag in a quart container
06:48 or a wide jar if you have that at home
06:51 and crimp it around the edges.
06:54 And then you have both hands available
06:56 to spoon the batter into the bag.
06:59 Professional chef trick.
07:00 So here I have two metal baking sheets,
07:02 which I've lined with parchment.
07:04 You're going to want light metal baking sheets
07:07 and light parchment paper.
07:09 Otherwise the bottoms of your macarons
07:11 will get brown much quicker.
07:13 I also have the bowl, which is mostly empty,
07:17 except for a couple little like bits of the batter.
07:21 And what I like to do with this
07:22 is use it to stick the corners of the parchment paper down
07:26 so they don't fly up in the oven
07:29 and touch the macaron and stick.
07:31 So piping macarons is something
07:33 that takes a lot of practice to do it perfectly,
07:37 but you don't need to be perfect at it
07:39 to produce a good macaron.
07:41 The main thing to keep in mind is that as you pipe,
07:44 you want this tip to be perpendicular to your baking sheet.
07:49 And you wanna use a nice even pressure
07:52 as you squeeze out about an inch disc.
07:56 After that, stop squeezing and just like lift the bag up
08:01 with no pressure.
08:03 Sounds difficult, it's not.
08:05 At this point, you might see that there are some like
08:09 upraised points in the middle of your macarons.
08:12 Don't worry about it
08:13 because it's all gonna come out with the banging.
08:16 We are now, once our macarons are piped,
08:19 going to bang the trays.
08:22 Why are we doing this?
08:23 It's simply to make sure that there are no air bubbles
08:27 or air pockets.
08:28 It's to get those out so that they don't like explode
08:32 and cause our macarons to go weird directions in the oven.
08:35 You're just gonna go two inches above your countertop
08:39 and make sure that the tray stays level.
08:41 If after you've banged the trays,
08:44 you notice that there are maybe still a couple
08:46 of tiny air pockets that need to be popped
08:48 or still some tiny upraised points,
08:51 you can take a toothpick and kind of smooth it over.
08:54 Other people like to use a wet finger,
08:57 like a finger that's just damp with water, that works too.
09:00 Now that our macarons are piped,
09:02 we are going to let them rest before we bake them.
09:05 This is the most important part of getting
09:09 that roughly little foot at the bottom of the macaron.
09:12 I'm just gonna nerd out here for a second.
09:14 Okay, when you let the macaron rest,
09:17 you are letting the exterior dry out.
09:19 The top will form this dry shell.
09:22 When the macaron hits the heat of the oven,
09:25 it's gonna want to expand, right?
09:27 All baked goods do it.
09:28 So the heat, when it makes the macaron puff,
09:32 if the top is dry, the heat is gonna go out the sides
09:36 and that's what makes the ruffle.
09:38 If you don't rest them long enough
09:40 and they aren't dry when you put them in the oven,
09:43 the heat is gonna go straight up to the top
09:45 and you are gonna get literally volcanoed macarons.
09:49 It's kinda cool, but not what we want here.
09:51 So rest them until they're dry to the touch on top.
09:55 We are gonna bake these at 325 in the center rack
09:58 of the oven for 10 to 12 minutes,
10:01 rotating after about eight minutes.
10:04 Our macarons are totally dry, totally cool.
10:08 It is time to fill them.
10:10 Now you can fill macarons with basically whatever you like,
10:14 jam, preserves if you wanna be fancy.
10:18 You can do curd, lemon curd.
10:20 You can even do like a chocolate ganache.
10:23 Typically, they are filled with something
10:25 that corresponds to the color of the shell.
10:28 So for the pink, we're gonna be using jam,
10:31 this raspberry jam.
10:33 If you wanna use a spoon to fill the macarons,
10:35 you can do that.
10:36 I find it easier to use a piping bag.
10:39 It's less mess.
10:40 So if you have one, you can do that too.
10:43 This is the easy, low stress part of this process.
10:46 Your kids can get involved.
10:48 You can make it a family affair.
10:50 This is the fun deco part.
10:51 So have everyone come in and make it a party.
10:55 One final thing.
10:56 I know you're gonna wanna devour them right away,
10:59 but macarons are actually best
11:01 if they mature in the fridge overnight.
11:04 It's nicer to eat and the texture is a lot better too.
11:07 Hear that?
11:10 That's how a good macaron should sound.
11:12 Crisp on the outside,
11:15 but it's gonna be super chewy in the center.
11:18 Because we allowed them to have that time to rest,
11:20 they puffed beautifully
11:22 and gave us that beautiful ruffled foot.
11:26 So pretty.
11:27 This recipe makes a ton of macarons, but don't worry.
11:32 You can freeze the unfilled shells.
11:33 You can freeze the macarons once they're filled,
11:36 all in the freezer in an airtight container
11:39 for at least a month.
11:41 You can also just throw them in the fridge
11:43 and they'll be good for up to a week.
11:45 They make great gifts, great baby shower favors,
11:48 great bridal shower favors.
11:50 Once you know how to make these,
11:52 you will never stop impressing your family and friends.
11:55 For more baking fun, stick around on delish.com.
11:59 (upbeat music)
12:02 (upbeat music)