Strawberry Macarons | Which baking mat is BEST to use?

hey sugar geeks liz here today we are making french macarons strawberry flavored but most importantly we are gonna find out which matte is best for making french macarons honestly i have no idea what's gonna happen but we're gonna find out coming up next on the sugar geek show all right so the first thing we're going to do is talk about our ingredients there's not very 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 aged fresh egg whites fresh means fresh out of the shell so it's just more important to crack your eggs and just use the egg whites themselves and then you put them in a bowl and you cover them with plastic wrap and you poke little holes in the top and what this does is it allows any extra liquid to evaporate out and just the egg white part the protein part is is left and it makes the macarons a little bit stronger so it's just like every little one of these things is like a one percent chance of the macarons being more successful and we want that one percent so we're going to try all of the things that people say to do to make your macarons more successful so step one aged fresh egg whites not pasteurized pasteurized egg whites are heat treated and this breaks down the protein making them less likely to whip into a meringue um there's always one person who's like i use prostitutes and it worked great good for you it's the chances of that happening are very low and it even says on the side of the box not good for meringue because the protein is very weak i should also mention that when you're cracking your egg whites you want to make sure you crack each egg into its own bowl just in case the egg yolk breaks you don't want to ruin your whole batch of egg whites and then use the egg yolk for like lemon curd or creme brulee or lemon curry with creme brulee you just want to make sure there is not a speck of egg yolk in those egg whites because even a tiny little speck can ruin your meringue and it will not whip up to stiff peaks no matter what you try secondly you want to make sure that you're weighing your egg whites so depending on where you're 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 are going off of ounces one egg white equals one ounce and while we're talking about measuring by weight you actually want to measure everything by weight the almond flour and the powdered sugar is all by weight down to the gram so we're using a handy dandy scale to measure out all of our ingredients if you need more information on how to use a kitchen scale you can watch that video i did on that one don't ask me about cups okay i swear we're gonna make macarons at some point but this is important information to know i swear if you don't want to hear this you can just you can click click forward i won't blame you so that brings us to the almond flour uh people ask me if they can use almond meal yes you can but you're going to need to grind it down to a finer texture in a food processor which i did in my last video in the chocolate macaron video but i found that if you use bob's red mill super fine almond flour like that you don't even need to to grind it down it's already ground to a very fine powder this is just straight almonds yeah blanched almonds oh i should mention that you can use um something besides almonds if you have like an intolerance to tree nuts i read that you can actually use pumpkin seeds it's a very similar uh texture it's very similar oil content you just have to grind it up into your own flour unless pumpkin seed flour exists it might or maybe sunflower seeds so that's kind of cool the nice thing about french macarons is they are naturally gluten free if you have an allergy to sugar it's not the cookie for you no special thing for powdered sugar it as long as it's powdered it's good i prefer to flavor my macarons with emulsion not extract because it actually is a stronger flavor and has sometimes color in it so you can just like kill two birds with one stone this is lorraine oil's strawberry emulsion but i also really like amaretti wild strawberry emulsion but it's so expensive so i'm using this one and then we have some cream of tartar which is actually just something that makes the egg whites stronger technically you could get away with not using this but there's a one percent chance that these macarons are going to turn out better if we use cream of tartar so we're using it and then we have our just regular granulated sugar which adds some more sweetness to the cookie and it 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 going to make like a quadruple batch of macarons it's a little the bowl is a little bit too big for what i need it to do so i like to make my macarons and a kitchenaid mixer normally i use a glass bowl but i broke it just like the saddest day ever so we're using my metal bowl you don't want to use a plastic bowl if you happen to be not using a kitchenaid mixer plastic holds on to oil and butter and then that gets into your egg whites and it can stop them from developing so you want a nice metal stainless steel bowl and a metal attachment so this is a white vinegar and it helps clean your utensils of any sort of fat so i'm just dipping a paper towel and some white vinegar it smells lovely and i'm just going to wipe down all of my attachments all right so now that we have everything prepped measured equipment ready to go we're going to start sifting you want to take your almond flour and your powdered sugar and we want to pass this through a sifter to remove any hard lumps now if there's big chunks of like powdered sugar or just things that are just kind of stuck together that doesn't count as a hard lump that is just like that's just stuck together so you can kind of break that down with your finger we just don't want any big pieces of hard sugar we don't want any big pieces of almonds that randomly got in there this is especially important if you're using a almond meal 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'd say if it's a lot like if you just have tons and tons of chunks then you might want to like replace that with some more almond flour so that and then re-weigh it to make sure that you have the right amount but if it's just a little bit don't worry about it i'm also making a double batch so if you're like making yours at home and you're like it seemed like liz had way more almond flour and powdered sugar than i have it's because i do i want all the macarons so i have a few lumps and bumps in here it's mostly powdered sugar a couple of little hard chunks you can see can you see that big chunk of almond right there so if you if i were to leave these in then that would show up in the surface of our macarons and they wouldn't be shiny all right so now we're going to sift a second time just best practices this also lightens up the mixture so that it's easier to fold into the whipped egg whites it's like little clouds it's really pretty making it rain powdered sugar and almond flour and see we didn't really have any lumps that time so we're good and then you sift a third time just kidding all right so let's whip 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 so first we're going to add in our egg whites room temperature egg whites whip up better than cold egg whites i'm using a stand mixer but you could in theory use a hand mixer but it would take a very very very long time to get to stiff peak so if you can use a stand mixer it will be helpful i'm going to whip this just until they're frothy once they have some larger 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 in goes the cream of tartar all at once we're going to whip this until we see thick glossy peaks this can take a few minutes let's talk about this consistency i used to think that this was stiff peaks they are kind of standing and holding their shape but they're definitely not it's not thick the bubbles and the meringue are still fairly large it's more like the consistency of shampoo like a lather so we want this to be really really thick if you take this this whisk and you push it around inside the bowl it's very easy to move it feels very thin it's got to keep going [Music] [Music] [Music] all right i can definitely feel that this is getting stiffer our meringue is starting to gather inside the whisk it's still glossy just gonna like do that test i don't want to hold it over my head i'm scared i feel like it's still a little bit soft because the middle wood the middle gets thicker before the outside does so even though the middle feels fairly stiff the outside isn't so i'm just going to kind of give it a couple little mixes by hand to get that outside part to the inside and we're going to add in our emulsion if you're going to add in any food coloring or anything else now is the time so before i pull this up i just want you to look and see how the meringue has really started gathering on the inside of the whisk so that's a sign that is basically ready it's still shiny it doesn't look crumbly or dry let's let's see how it feels it's definitely stiff enough like that's not going anywhere i can just feel that it's viscous like it's hard it's harder for my whisk to go through this it doesn't feel soft at all that's very it stands straight up it's very stiff peak i'm just mixing this with my hand and as i'm doing this i feel like it's getting softer making sure that it's all consistently the same thickness a lot of chefs say to finish it by hand like this that looks beautiful look at that uh this is a very common place for people to run into problems uh not knowing how stiff their meringue should be they're really afraid of over whipping so then they under whip and that's what causes hollow shells if you have a hollow shell do not freak out i i pay five dollars a macaron and some bakeries and they still have a hollow shell so don't feel like you've failed just because you have a whole shell it just happens sometimes they're very finicky cookies they still taste delicious you tell me what disasters you've had with macarons and i'll try and help you work through those leave them down in the comments so what we're going to do is we're going to add in 1 3 of our almond mixture into the meringue and this it just starts the emulsion process if i were to just dump all this flour into the meringue and started mixing then you would definitely over mix you have these big clumps 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 folding is when you go around the outside of the meringue and we're making it look like a washing machine so we really don't want to be damaging this meringue at all it looks like it's not doing anything but it is i'm just using my spatula to just go under the meringue lift it up turn it over try not to hurt it cut through once right now what we have is a lot of meringue with a little bit of almond flour and it's kind of not evenly distributed so now i'm going to add in the rest of my flour so the first thing we're going to do is focus on just incorporating the flower into the meringue by folding don't worry about anything else right now this is where you get your arm workout in really regretting those two pound weights in jazzercise yesterday we have a very lumpy weird batter now but it is all incorporated so now the next step is getting it to the ribbon stage see the ribbon stage is when you go like this okay so the ribbon stage is when the batter falls off of the spatula and you can make a figure eight with the ribbon of batter to get to the ribbon stage we need to knock a little bit of this air out so we're going to hold our spatula flat and rotate around do that a couple times and then underneath it starts to look like lava it starts oozing looking very flowy it is looking more cohesive though if at this stage your batter is looking really watery or broken you just may not have whipped up your egg whites correctly and unfortunately the only thing to do is to start over doing this very gently you want to be gentle with your macaron batter always a little test this is not a ribbon yet this is just falling off in a clump yes if you've watched enough recipe videos like i have some people have like exact amounts of turns and like all of these really specific things that they try but to me it just depends on how much liquid is in your egg whites and how humid it is that day how old your eggs are there's so many things that can affect it okay so this is starting to get a little bit more to the consistency we're looking for oh okay so i'm very very close to being able to make a figure eight see how it just runs in a strip like that there we go there you go i'm going to say that's probably pretty close you can see it's kind of oozing like lava it's nice and shiny just getting any kind of like stuff right off the bottom make sure that's mixed in into a piping bag we will go i have a 804 just a medium round tip it doesn't matter really what size all right so i'm going to put my batter into my piping bag first i feel like the batter starts to get kind of like a weird consistency after it sits so i want to make sure i pipe everything out at the same time so let's talk about our pans really quick i'm using this mat that has little ridges that supposedly make it easier to hold in the feet and for them to keep their shape we've got a regular silicone mat that's just flat fairly large though so i'm going to make them try and make them all the same size and then what i always use is parchment paper with a template i think that the parchment's still going to do the best but we'll see all right i'm going to glue down my parchment with just a little bit of macaron batter and when you're piping macarons you want to make sure you're holding your bags straight up and down and you only want to pipe to about three quarters of the way and then when you tap the the pan on the table they spread more don't do this when the baby is napping so you can see some little bubbles popping i can actually see some bubbles coming to the surface and then you can come in and sit here and pop any sort of bubbles that you see under the surface because not only do they cause problems during baking to that big bubble they can cause cracking but they also just make the surface of your macaron like not pretty and just remember even if they don't look perfect they will still be yummy now that these are piped i really want to take out my template the paper can can like change the way they bake so so now i'm going to set these aside to dry while i pipe out my other ones so depending on how humid it is this could take 15 minutes if it's really dry in your area or it could take you know like an hour so you just want to let them dry until you can touch them and you feel like this leathery skin on top a texture it's not sticky i forgot to mention that it's important to pipe straight up and down so that you have even amount of batter on all sides so your macarons don't rise unevenly let me know in the comments which one you think is going to turn out the best taking bets i got this from amazon but i think any macaron mat with the guides would work really well one of the problems people have is their macarons sticking to the parchment paper in which case that just means that your macarons are not quite baked enough or they're they're too wet basically and um so you can always just bake them for like another extra minute they should release off of the parchment paper very easily all right now let's try this guy yeah there's a lot of spots on this one that's kind of nice i wonder if this little ridge is gonna leave a spot on the bottom i guess that doesn't really matter if you wanted 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 through the tops of your macarons guess how i figured that one out so now i'm just going to put these here until i develop a nice leathery skin got my space heater going to make the air warmer because it is very humid today and hopefully in 20 minutes we'll have macarons ready to go in the oven while doing some research on brownies and how brownies get like that crackle texture i learned that when you you whip together eggs and sugar that actually is what develops that shell so that's why it's really important to be whipping up those meringues to a stiff peak is because it develops a really thick meringue shell okay so we have a skin that has developed on top of these guys so that means that when we put them in the oven and they start baking the skin is going to trap all that air lift the macaron cookie which makes those beautiful little feet around the bottom bake in the oven at 300 degrees fahrenheit for about 15 minutes or until they're just starting to turn lightly brown around the edges these guys are a little bit on the smaller side so i'm going to bake them for 10 but if they were bigger macarons you want to go closer to 15. they should pull off the parchment or silicone mat easily 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 the thing that i noticed first of all is that most of them have turned out really well there's no cracking there's no splitting there's no exploding feet out anyway so that's proof that we mix them properly and um i don't ever use silicone mats so i'm actually really surprised that these turned out so well maybe it's because this is a special silicone mat just for macarons but they are perfectly even every single one right rose perfectly except for this one which could be just it wasn't mixed well um but they're all like really nice like really nice feet and they release super well with a really smooth and shiny back there's no sticking no cracks if your macarons are sticking to the mat then they might not be baked enough and then the parchment paper which is what i usually use i feel like did not perform as well as it normally does all of my macarons on this side and this side all fell over and collapsed and that could have been from the parchment paper lifting on the edges could have been from uneven baking but i mean otherwise the ones in the middle they have nice smooth bottoms nice feet they're definitely not fails this mat over here caused me the most problems which i didn't really understand why i might have just bought a cheap one but these sides all curled up during baking so all the ones on the side collapsed and fell over which is really sad you know what it might be it this mat might be a little bit too big for this pan so it wasn't lying completely fat so that's probably my fault you do have to make sure you let these cool for five or ten minutes before you try and remove them from the silicone mat or the parchment because they will stick and tear if you try to take them off when they're still hot as far as the actual cookie goes so these are not even brown at all on the bottom so i feel like this maybe insulated it and possibly needed a little bit more baking because they're sticking yeah i definitely bake for longer on these thicker mats literally every single one of these is stuck oh there's one i got one off okay we have a pair two different sizes i'm filling these guys which is some vanilla italian meringue which tastes super delicious with french macarons you can fill macarons with curd american buttercream ganache i mean that's really where they get all of their flavor from so you can be creative if you want some ideas for macaron flavoring go ahead and check out my filling and frosting recipes on sugargeekshow.com all right results i think this was my winner mostly because it was really easy to use all of the macarons turned out perfectly it has the guide built in so i don't have to like put the template underneath the parchment paper i don't have to glue down the edges i think one of the reasons this did work well is because it is actually a silicone baking mat it's not just thick silicone there's lots of space all the way around the outside edge it fits perfectly in my pan like come on and the guides are evenly spaced so it's like somebody knew what they were doing when they made this i think this one might have been user error like it didn't fit my pan very well which i would say is a downside like i don't want to have special pans for my mat so this mat is just very slightly too wide so it didn't quite fit in my pan very well the macarons stuck very badly and it could just be this brand so i mean i'm just saying that this particular brand did not work out for me and they stuck super bad and then there is my parchment paper which i really wanted to win but alas i mean there's no comparison the the silicone did way better than the parchment paper and half of my macarons fell over because i think my parchment paper lifted so silicone you win the good news is they all taste the same going in the mouth the strawberries so good if you put these in the fridge and age them overnight they get even better they get chewier the flavor develops even more so definitely stick these in the fridge and let them age overnight you can also freeze them take the shells put them in airtight containers stick them in the freezer make a thousand of them all at once and then you will have french macarons whenever you want so that's it that's everything you need to know about using different types of maps for making french macarons if you want to see more videos like this one which i know you do don't forget to hit that subscribe button i'm liz merrick and i'll see you guys next time bye i'm all jazzed up on sugar

Channel: Sugar Geek Show

Views: 257,030

Keywords: sugar geek show, tutorial, macarons, strawberry, strawberry macarons, macaroons, french, tips, how to make macarons, how to flavor macarons, flavored macarons, meringue, french macarons, macaron recipe, how to, best macarons, perfect macarons, french macarons asmr, valentines day, recipe for french macarons, strawberry macaron filling, french macarons no hollow, french macarons recipe easy, perfect meringue for macarons, strawberry macaron filling recipe, how to pipe macarons, cookie

Id: LEuBuV783nw

Length: 25min 59sec (1559 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020