Patisserie 14: Blood Orange and Rosemary Macarons

Macarons are a type of sandwich cookie that has exploded in popularity in recent years as a dainty snack. Laduree in Paris is largely credited with introducing the cookie to the public as the Parisian Macaron, where macaron previously referred to the unfilled, singular cookie halves. The cookie portions are meringue with almond flour, and the filling is typically a ganache, buttercream, or other semi-solid flavor component. The cookie is typically smooth on top, with a ruffled brim called the "foot", and flat on the bottom, and assembled macarons are aged for at least a day after filling to allow the cookie interior to moisten.

So, I've been dreading this section on macarons because their recent popularity has taken the form of the pastry down the same road as the croissant: held to a known standard that prioritizes hyperoptimization of certain features that the public has deemed "ideal". In the case of croissants, I am in major disagreement with several of the ideal features and thus unmotivated to pursue them as a pastry learning endeavor; in the case of macarons, I simply did not think I would like eating them enough to want to make batches over and over to iron out issues that might not even matter in the finished product. They're intimidating because there are a lot of ways they can go "wrong" according to the rubric of the ideal, and perfecting them is tedious (as one can imagine from the multitude of blogs proclaiming strategies for troubleshooting to obtain the "perfect" macaron). Plus, the last time I made them, which was admittedly almost a decade ago in college, they were absolutely a disaster, ideal aside. 

But I didn't start this trajectory of patisserie to just make things I think are adequate, I guess. I want to get good, to figure out why some things go wrong and how to fix them, and to make little cakes I will want to eat more than what I see in a pastry shop window. So I dutifully called up a friend who often makes macarons for gatherings of friends and headed to her kitchen with a bunch of equipment in tow for a guided macaron baking session. 

We started by making the filling. The original recipe in The Book was for lemon basil cream, but I had a glut of oranges and blood oranges and tangerines from my produce box, so I decided to try using those and a few sprigs of rosemary instead, remembering also to reduce the amount of sugar in the macarons. 

Scheming our way through our mise-en-place

Setting the gelatin sheets in a bowl of cold water to soften, we split up tasks: she whisked the eggs and sugar, and I juiced the oranges.

A glut of beautiful citrus from my produce box

The juice of the oranges then got whisked in with the eggs and sugar. This was all cooked, along with the rosemary sprigs, until it thickened like pastry cream. We did not get to the exact thick consistency of pastry cream even after a little simmering, but it was apparently not going to get any thicker, so we pulled the saucepan off the heat and stirred in the softened gelatin.

Preparing the custard for heat

My friend strained the orange rosemary cream into the bowl of diced butter, and I helpfully held the smol strainer.

I'M HELPING

The next step was to process with an immersion blended until smooth. I found this to be a little odd, but it's an accepted trick to smooth out pastry cream using an immersion blended to mask any scrambled egg curds, so I suppose it does the double duty here of mixing in the butter and smoothing out the cream.

Immersion blending the butter and the custard to eliminate any curdled bits in the final product

This next step I also found odd: The Book calls for a little bit of almond flour to be mixed into the filling! I'm not sure whether it's just meant to add body or absorb moisture from the cream, or to give a sense of culinary cohesion between the almond cookies and the filling. We stirred it in and then placed plastic wrap atop the surface of the cream, setting it in the fridge to chill completely while we worked on the cookies.

Mixing in some hair of the dog almond flour into the filling

For the cookie portion of the macaron, The Book primarily uses an Italian meringue. Note that this does not disqualify the macarons from being French macarons (see pedantic note* at the end)! I weighed out the egg whites for the meringue and my friend set to making the sugar syrup because she hadn't used this method before. I hope this endeavor convinced her that a candy thermometer was a worthwhile object to own for baking.

Egg whites separated for the meringue and for the almond flour, almond flour pre-measured in a bag, and confectioner's sugar

I didn't take good photos of the Italian meringue process because I've made it umpteen times now, but if you are curious on the details, you can read about my first time making it and what it entails during the buttercream portion of the hazelnut dacquoise post. We added in a little purple and a little red gel food coloring once the meringue was approaching room temperature, yielding a lavender-tinged light pink.

The remainder of the egg whites were mixed with the sifted almond flour and powdered sugar, which was also a departure from most macaron recipes, and this resulted in an almond paste. Perhaps relatedly, the next step was the unusual reversal of mixing in a third of the meringue into the almond paste, rather than the more common method of incorporating the almond flour/sugar into the meringue in two batches. After the first third of sacrificial meringue was stirred in, the other two thirds were folded in as well, working until smooth between additions.

Stirring the first batch of meringue into the almond paste

Our resulting batter was very thick. This was to be expected, because Italian meringue is more stable and less prone to deflating than French meringue. We began stirring the mixture gently to deflate the batter until the correct consistency (which many unhelpful sources relate as "lava" or "magma") was reached, a process known as macaronage. When the mixture was liquid enough to drop slowly from the spoon, we stopped and prepared the baking sheets.

Our batter was just barely falling off the spoon, but it was not a drizzle at any point

Using a 3cm object to trace circles on parchment, we made little templates that we slipped underneath the silicone mats. It basically comes down to a matter of personal style when choosing silicone baking mats or parchment paper. While there are people who swear by either, we found that the macarons baked fine on both, though they needed significantly longer baking time on the silicone mats (the recipe was developed for parchment, in this case). We ended piping almost 1.5 sheet pans worth of macarons, a bit over the stated yield of 30 assembled macarons.

Two sets of macarons piped onto silicone baking mat, and the remainders on a sheet of parchment

 Macaron recipes often include a resting time before baking, which allows the top of the unbaked meringue to dry somewhat and form a shell that will encourage tidy foot formation and even baking later. This recipe didn't call for one, but we ended up incorporating it just by way of needing to wait for each sheet to finish baking before putting a new one in. 

To avoid air bubbles, piped macarons are rapped firmly underneath the sheet, or the entire sheet is slammed down on a stable counter a few times, to dislodge air bubbles. After making loud noises with the sheet pans, we used moistened fingertips to smooth down any remaining peaks from our piping. Because the slamming motion causes the piped macaron batter to flatten and spread, we just barely had enough space between each macaron to keep them from touching. 

The first batch took about twenty minutes to bake, which is much longer than the expected 12-14 minutes but reasonable given that the oven was not in convection mode and we had additional thermal mass from the silicone mat. Macarons are done when they can be gently peeled off of the baking surface. We had one cracked macaron in the first batch, but we also had a few "nipples", where it appeared an air bubble or something had not completely escaped. But overall, they were smooth on top, all formed feet, and generally looked much better than my first attempt at macarons.

First batch of macarons out of the oven! A few nipples and one crack but overall well-formed with feet

After they cooled, the macaron shells were fairly crisp and dry, and much to my dismay, they had a significant hollow. All of this in conjunction, based on the troubleshooting guides on the internet, led me to believe we had undermixed the batter (peaked shells with hollow tops) and that the oven temperature might be either too high or too low (probably too high).

A peek at the inside of a few macarons, which came out hollow (bubble between top of shell and the "meat" of it)

But the good thing about this particular issue of hollow macarons is that the recipe in The Book offers an elegant way to mask it. Using our thumbs, we pressed a little divot into the bottom of each cookie per instruction, which had the side effect of mostly filling the gap between the top of the shell and the interior. We conjectured that this step was to prevent the macaron shells from sliding with respect to each other once filled, which is an issue one can anticipate happening when you have a gel sandwiched by two flat surfaces.

Pressing gentle divots into the bottom face of each macaron shell to give the filling some purchase (and conveniently mask some of the hollow inside)

Then we matched them up by circumference, so we wouldn't end up with a pair of unfortunate sizes. I'm glad my friend suggested this, because I never would have thought about doing it on my own. We tried to match each malformed macaron with a smooth one so they would have a surface to sit flat on.

We paired macaron shells by size, and also tried to make sure each pair had one unblemished one to rest flat on after assembly. But we had one leftover baby macaron that came out Luxemburgli-sized (Swiss-style tiny macarons) and was beautifully shaped all by its lonesome

Finally, we pulled the chilled filling out of the fridge and piped it into the macarons. We set this up by setting rows of macaron pairs down on a sheet with space between each row, then taking off the top macaron and placing it opposite its partner in the space between rows. Then we piped down one side of each row, aiming for a quantity roughly one-shell-height, for a final cookie ratio of 2:1 cookie-cream. 

The colors of the macaron shells faded slightly with baking, but they still matched the color of the blood orange cream really well; I joked that we managed to make predictably millenial pink macarons, which was very on-trend. Macarons are meant to rest for a day in an airtight container in the fridge after baking. This allows the meringue-based shell, which is by nature crisp and dry, to absorb some moisture from the filling and mellow out. And, while macarons should be eaten in about three days after assembly at most, we finished off the last of these on day four and they were not very crisp but still delicate and delicious. The orange flavor was juicy but not very tart, so these were still fairly sweet, but the rosemary did a good job of coming through more strongly than we originally assumed based on the taste of the cream alone. And of course, the almond flour was a nice earthy, nutty base for it all.

Filled macarons, aggressively millenial pink all around

At this point, I've become grateful for the macaron-ideal-community because of the wealth of suggestions for troubleshooting. Notes and thoughts: 

• The ritualistic sensations of peeling each macaron off the sheet, matchmaking based on size, carefully pressing the divot without cracking the top, and pressing the cookies together around the slight give of the filling all were very satisfying and meditative. I'm not dreading the month of iteration on these quite as much anymore, except that this recipe made a whole lotta macarons and that's a lot of potential mistakes to eat.
  
• We definitely should have done more macaronage (stirred the batter more) just based on the consistency. I'd like to defend myself by noting several confounding factors: Italian meringue is stiffer than French meringue to begin with, who has ever actually dripped lava off of a spoon and would even know what that looks like, and honey (another common simile reference for flow rate) comes in a multitude of viscosities! So I guess I need to mix even more in future batches and aim for a more liquidy batter. All this PTSD from the first dacquoise meringue really has me messed up.
  
• Hopefully increasing macaronage time will aid with eliminating the nipples, but I'm still a little confused why they happen; we slammed the sheets pretty hard and popped all visible bubbles.
  
• I want to try printing out a template for piping macarons to get them to mostly be the same size and shape and distance apart. 
• Speaking of piping, we didn't realize until afterwards that our piping technique of a spiral was "incorrect." Most sources recommend holding the piping bag perpendicular to the sheet, piping directly at the center of the desired macaron circle from macaron-height, and then doing a little twist-and-retreat at the end to break off the piping bag. This should also help eliminate some bubbles.
  
• Because this recipe was developed for use with parchment paper in a convection oven, I'm surprised it managed as well as it did despite both those, and I'm looking forward to trying this out at home.
  
• This may be impossible, but I'd really love if there were a way to make the shells less sweet. Unfortunately. sugar is a structural component in meringue, and the tant pour tant ratio of 1:1 powdered sugar to almond flour is going to be difficult to modify.
  

 

*Pedantic note: A macaron, pronounced with the nasal "ɔ̃n" French sound and sometimes called a French macaron, is this light almond flour meringue sandwich cookie. The type of meringue, whether French (sugar and egg whites beaten together) or Italian (hot sugar syrup beaten into egg whites) is irrelevant for the nomenclature of the final baked good; both French macarons and Italian macarons exist for this reason. HOWEVER: A macaroon, with an extra O and thus pronounced with the long "un" to rhyme with "soon," is the dense confection made of egg whites mixed with sugar, nut flour or coconut, and possibly flavorings. They are not pronounced the same way, and thus there should be no confusion between them to begin with; Americans simply started misreading macaron as macaroon because of more familiarity with the latter, making a whole mess out of things.