The SHOCKING SECRET to French macarons

this truly shocking French macaron recipe is sponsored by Squarespace the shockingly comprehensive solution for all of your website building and hosting needs get 10% off your first site with my link and code in the description the macaron is a beloved old-world pastry consisting of two almond meringue cookies sandwich some kind of filling they are delicious and naturally gluten free for all you celiacs out there on a per weight basis they've also got to be the most expensive dessert that you're likely to see in a bakery so it makes sense to try to make them at home though they are notoriously fussy okay now the big challenge with macaroons is how you get perfectly smooth domes arching over those little ruffled edges known adorably as macaron feet and know they don't have to look perfect they just have to taste good who are you trying to impress if you liberate yourself from any precious expectations about how these things are supposed to look they become one of the easiest and cheapest desserts that you can make in your kitchen and they're damn delicious we're gonna make chocolate ones here's two eggs egg whites are easier to separate and they beat up a little bit better if they are warm I saw one crazy recipe seriously call for microwaving your eggs to the precisely perfect temperature but the easy way to do it is just to leave them in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes they'll warm right up you can separate the eggs however you like I just like to crack the shell and then pass the yolk between the two sides until all of the whites kind of ooze out into a bowl underneath it's a little bit dangerous because if you puncture the yolk and any of it falls into the whites you're gonna have to start over but this is the method that dirties no additional dishes okay now because eggs are a variable size and this recipe must be precise you've gotta weigh your whites on a gram scale and you know the eggs are fine just eat them the way they are okay now you're gonna need a $300 stand mixer and no look I'm not gonna tell you to do this with a whisk that'd be hard but a twelve dollar electric hand mixer makes this a cinch and I think actually offers more control than a stand mixer you want to beat the whites until they're just fluffy and foamy there's no need to risk over beating them at this stage we're just giving them a head start then in goes sugar now you're gonna need to get out that gram scale again and you know look if you really like to cook by weights that's totally cool I have weights in the description but I'm gonna do this entire recipe with one measuring cup 1/2 a cup of normal granulated sugar now you're gonna have to gradually sprinkle that in while you beat and you know you can just dump it in I tried it both ways it makes no difference now you're gonna need to put this over a double boiler right no you can just do it in the bowl I'll beat the sugar into the eggs until it's all nice and glossy and the beaters are leaving really defined trails this is more sugar than a lot of recipes would have you use I like the cotton candy ish melt-in-your-mouth texture this gets you but you can use less if you give up on the idea that your macaroons have to be cosmetically quote unquote perfect you can radically alter the ingredient proportions for example these ones I made with way less sugar these ones I made with way more sugar I've tried the same thing with the almonds every batch came out different and they were all good I liked all of them for different reasons and they all had basic structural integrity which is the only objective standard that really matters meringue cookies may be the most forgiving pastry on earth if you don't get hung up on appearances part of the fun of cooking at home is the variety you get from a handcrafted product the Industrial Revolution was 200 years ago if I want factory perfection I will buy it from a factory anyway I beat in half a cup of sugar you could do less those Peaks look pretty good to me now to make almond flour you'll need to put blanched almonds into a food processor and blitz them on high for a good five minutes and then hmm that's still not very fine that's gonna be gritty in the final cookie so what you got to do is process it a whole lot more and then you know just buy almond flour I will acknowledge that some almond flour is on the market are not as fine as others but the packages usually have a little window in them where you can visually compare almond flour is great for a lot of things and you can store it in the freezer indefinitely I'm doing like three-quarters of a cup more would make the meringue taste more cookie ish less would make it be more candy ish and now you're gonna need to dirty at least two additional dishes by sifting all the dry ingredients together and you know you just dump it all under the eggs then comes an equal quantity of powdered sugar about three quarters of a cup but it doesn't have to be perfect and then cocoa powder I'm doing about a quarter of a cup which is pretty chocolatey that's natural cocoa but if you want more of an Oreo flavor use Dutch cocoa and my experiments sifting did absolutely nothing noticeable to the sugar or almond flour it does break up those chunks of cocoa powder a few of which might end up in your finished macaroons like that but I have no idea who my vested with the authority to say that's a bad thing truffles are coated in cocoa powder for chocolate macaroons especially I think a little bit of salt is good but really just a few grains these things are mostly air there's very little substance here to season also salt could maybe mess with the egg chemistry a little bit but a few grains is totally fine people say that you have to fold the dry stuff into the eggs in batches but all at once seems to work fine for me I'm just cutting down the middle with a spatula and then folding the mixture over on itself it should feel like the mixture is way too dry that's good they will come together eventually just be sure to really scrape down the sides the French call this mixing phase macaron --oj because of course and I think that you can stop when it starts to look like a mousse like that if you keep mixing it past this point the mixture will start to loosen which will give you a flatter smoother macaroon the batter on the right I just barely mixed together the batter on the left I mixed until it started to go loose and when I baked them they looked like this people have all kinds of tricks about how to tell when you've mixed the batter to the perfect consistency but I say if you go into this without a predetermined notion of what the perfect consistency actually is you can't lose I liked both of these though honestly I think I prefer the craggy tops that you get from a thicker batter you can kind of test the consistency by dropping a dollop off your spatula and then watching how it spreads okay now you're gonna need to load this into a piping bag and no piping bags are great if you need to make like 2,000 macaroons a day and if you need them to all be perfectly sized and shaped and neither of those conditions apply to me I've got a baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper on it and here we're gonna use this very high-tech piece of kitchen gear called a spoon I scooped up a spoonful of batter and I just nudge it off the spoon and a nice little dollop with my finger they're not perfectly shaped and I don't care this does take a few minutes but when you're working at this small of a scale I don't think the piping bag really saves you much time when you factor in the loading phase and it's wasteful even if you're gonna use a reusable piping bag you're still gonna waste a lot of batter stuck inside the bag there we go 20 cookies for 10 pretty big macaroons sandwiches you can make them smaller if you wanted and you could bake them right away or you could do the traditional we just let them sit and dry out for like a half an hour that will get you a smoother surface and force the expansion of the macaron upward in the oven instead of outward I am drying them for a half hour because it's a totally passive step now to prep the oven you're gonna need to preheat to 425 Fahrenheit and then immediately lower it a hundred degrees when you put in the meringues and then you go plain old 350 Fahrenheit or 180 C is perfectly sufficient now to prevent the meringues from cracking you're gonna need to emulate a professional steam injection oven by pouring boiling water into a pan inside the oven and then oh just let the meringues crack if you let them crack the cracking becomes a great indication of when they're done they start cracking they're done these took about 15 minutes one time back when I had no children or real responsibilities I spent months trying to make perfectly smooth macaroons and then I realized I liked the cracked ones better the cracked or otherwise irregular edges get crispier and I think more caramelized or my are defied or whatever they're tastier these do have to cool and solidify for a long time before you can fill them that's fine we can make our filling now I'm just gonna do a simple ganache that's equal parts cream and chocolate I like dark chocolate which you can easily measure via a displacement and you can put some sugar in there if you want but the meringues are very sweet so I want this more like a bitter chocolate to balance out the sugar in the cookies just chocolate and cream for me I'll throw this in the microwave until it just starts to bubble pull it out and let it sit and melt for a minute and then stir it up until smooth that's pretty that's too loose to use as a filling so we need to cool it back down again you could just wait an hour at room temperature or do it the fast way in the fridge just check on it and stir it frequently that is the perfect consistency right there pick up a meringue smear on a little filling find the meringue of roughly comparable size and shape and marry them together beautiful again meringue is very insubstantial so you've got to be careful about over filling these I think it should feel like not quite enough ganache when you're doing this otherwise you could really overwhelm the meringues you could eat these right away but for me they are ten times better the next day the meringues at this point have absorbed some moisture from the filling and from the air so now they've got more of that chewy marshmallowy consistency that I really like I love how the big air pockets in there feel as the layers collapse when you bite through some people work so hard to prevent any large air pockets from forming in there I have no idea why I love the air pockets indeed who is to say that the traditional uniform dome is the right way in the mirror universe where the more irregular surface happened to evolve as the cultural ideal me with a goatee is probably saying now these don't have that cracked craggy surface that tradition really demands but they're ok if you don't get hung up on appearances long live the Empire now look I'm mostly just having a little bit of fun here if you really like quote-unquote perfect macaroons and if you enjoy perfecting that craft I think that's awesome but it's also good for all of us to think critically about what perfect is to us because I think these are perfectly awesome they were ridiculously easy and I enjoy that they will come out a little bit different next time like this was from the next batch that I baked a little bit different and still great likewise whatever your perfect notion of a website may be you can easily whip up with Squarespace you don't have to be a master of a website Taj or whatever the French might say what do you need to build a site for let's say it's a local business which template looks good to you let's say this one everything I'm doing right here you can do for free right now at squarespace.com you just go into the template replace their pictures and their words with yours and you can customize further from there if you want to sell your macaroons online you can just drop in one of these product blocks and Squarespace will handle all the e-commerce for you when you're ready to take your site live you can do us both a favor and save 10% by going to squarespace.com slash Ragusa that's in the description thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring the video and real quick if you make your macaroons with less sugar they come out with more of a chewy brownie consistency and since they're less sweet they go real nice with a filling of marshmallow fluff but that's just me let your imagination run wild also thanks to Alex my first cousin once-removed who showed me around the beautiful West Side Market in his hometown of Cleveland Ohio I freaking love that place

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 2,002,438

Keywords: how to make macarons, french macarons, french macaron, easy macaron recipe, french macaron recipe, macaron recipe, how to make, macaron tutorial, how to make french macaron, macaron troubleshooting, french macarons filling recipe, french macarons recipe, french macaron recipe all the tips and tricks, chocolate macarons, chocolate macarons recipe, french macaroons, how to make french macaroons, chocolate macaroons, french macaron recipe video, macaron recipe for beginners

Id: tsCvAijBn4Y

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/RobbyG52]

I like / agree with the idea, but couldn’t watch the whole thing coz of the repeated yelling of “NO YOU CAN JUST...”

[u/Irondiy]

macaron != macaroon

[u/xXChickenInTheMudXx]

Anyone else get three seconds in?

[u/Udo_Dirkschneider]

Adam is gettin kinda annoying tbh. Trying too hard to be controversial (like the metric system videos) instead of just really questioning traditional cooking methods, which was the premise of his videos. Also, don't trust his recipes until you try them yourself, his mac and cheese recipe is legit ass.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/nicktherat]

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOO i wont make a video under 10 minutes! good stuff, but offa

[u/Trackpad94]

I am never going to make these but I still watched the video...

[u/AGoodKisser]

I like the yelling.

[u/mykneemo]

I commented on one of his earlier vids posted on reddit saying he was unwatchable and condescending, and i got downvoted. Looks like that hasn't changed and people are starting to agree.