Today on Sugar Spun Run, we will be making French macarons. Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here! And today, I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested, well researched, and perfected recipe. Today's recipe has been years in the making. I have spent a lot of time perfecting this one. I think it's super solid. It's great for beginners, so let's go ahead and get started. Now I'm going to preface this recipe by telling you that I recommend —highly recommend—you get yourself a kitchen scale. I am going to primarily be providing the ingredients for today's recipe with weight measurements. That's because macarons have a history of being super finicky. You really wanna have precision when you're measuring your ingredients, and the best way to do that is with a kitchen scale. Another thing I want to cover before we start is your equipment. The bowls that you use, the tools that you use, you are going to want to make sure they are completely clean, dry, and grease free before we begin. We're working with egg whites, we’re making a meringue, even a tiny bit of oil, even if it's oil from your fingers, can keep the egg whites from whipping up properly. That can be super frustrating, so set yourself up for success. When we are first making our meringue, I recommend you avoid using silicone, rubber, or plastic, whether that be whisks or bowls, just stay away from them. Glass and metal are your best bets here. Okay, for our eggs, you are going to be using just egg whites for this recipe. And you will need a hundred and ten grams. Avoid using store bought egg whites, the kind that are sold in cartons. We're going to crack our eggs fresh, and then I'm going to pour into my measuring cup where I'm going to weigh them. I have my measuring cup on here. I have this tared, so it's set to zero grams. I always crack the eggs, oops, in a separate bowl because if I get a little bit of yolk in there or shell in there, I want to be able to fish it out with contaminate—without contaminating all of the other whites that will be in that measuring cup. So the easiest—see, I got a little bit of shell in there and I'll fish that out. The easiest way to separate your eggs is just to crack the shell, pass the yolk back and forth until all of the white has dropped out. And then I'll pour this into my measuring cup and I'll just repeat until I have a hundred and ten grams. Now you can discard the yolks or you can save them. I will list some frosting recipes over on the blog that use egg yolks in case you wanna save your yolks for making a frosting that you can use for the filling or you can just toss them. Now, when I'm separating my egg whites, I do wanna point out to you, you may be able to see here I have a little bit of protein that's still attached to the yolk. I actually want that in with my whites. It's going to help make them whip up a little bit more easily. So I want that protein in there. So I'm using the other shell to just break that off. We’ll pour this in here. Normally, I can get a hundred and ten grams out of three eggs, but it seems these eggs might be a little bit smaller. So I did go a little bit over, so I'm going to fish out some of that excess egg white because, again, when you're making macarons, you do want to be precise, so I want exactly a hundred and ten grams. Okay, if you've ever made macarons before, perhaps you've heard about aging egg whites. Aging egg whites is a step that I do not always do, but, again, if you're a beginner, I recommend it. What it does is it allows some of the liquid that's in the egg whites to evaporate. Now the way to age your egg whites is you're going to cover your measuring cup with a piece of plastic wrap. Then we're just going to poke a couple holes in this because what aging egg whites really is is we're allowing some of the liquid that's in the whites to evaporate out. This sort of dries out the egg whites and it's also going to contribute to helping to stabilize your meringue. This is especially helpful if you're in a more humid climate. If I'm making these in the winter, I might skip this step. Now, you'll let this sit for at least twenty four hours before using your egg whites. And if you let them age in the fridge, you're going to want to let them come back to room temperature before you make your meringue. Next thing I wanna talk about is our almond flour and our powdered sugar. These are two main ingredients you'll find in every macaron recipe because every macaron recipe uses pretty much the same ingredients, and we're going to be using a hundred and fifty grams of each of these ingredients. Now, for your almond flour, blanched, super fine almond flour is best for this recipe. Now almond flour has a tendency to clump, you can even see the little clumps in there right now, so we're going to be sifting it. We're going to pour this into my sifter because I wanna break up any clumps or bumps or if there are any large pieces of almond remaining, I wanna weed those out. I don't want them to end up in my shells or my shells will look bumpy. Now some almond flour is sold unblanched, which just means they haven't removed the brown part of the shell of the almond. You can make macarons with that. They just don't look as nice because they have a little bit of that coloring to them, but it would work. Now, if you cannot find super fine almond flour, My recommendation to you would be to take your almond flour, take your powdered sugar, put the two of them in a food processor together. Pulse for fifteen one second to pulses, stir the mixture, do another fifteen one second pulses, and then sift the two ingredients together before proceeding. I have some clumps that aren't breaking up, so I'll just use a spoon to kind of help the sifter along. Today, I actually have a lot of little lumps that aren't going through my sifter. I don't want them in my macarons, so what I'm going to do is I will just pour them out into a different bowl. I'm going to weigh how much that is. And it's only four grams, but I want to be super precise, so I'm going to add another four grams through my sifter. Next, let's grab our powdered sugar. We're also going to sift this to get any clumps out. It also helps aerate the materials a little bit, which is also going to help them combine nicely into your meringue. Powdered sugar likes to sit on the sides, so I'll just smack it around a little bit. Now just whisk everything together until these two are nicely combined. Alright, now grab yourself another large mixing bowl. And to this, we are going to add our egg whites. I do have egg whites here that I aged last night that I'm going to be using, and these are room temperature as yours should be. Now, you can absolutely make this recipe in a stand mixer using the whisk attachment. However, I personally prefer to use my electric hand mixer just because I feel like I can keep a better eye on the meringue and I get a better feel for how everything is coming together. So this just my preference. Now, I'm going to beat the egg whites on medium speed until they become foamy, which is just usually about thirty seconds. Now that I see lots of little bubbles forming on the surface, I'm going to add my cream of tartar. Now, cream of tartar is—I like to think of it as training wheels for my meringue, but, again, it helps your meringue stabilize and it’s especially helpful if you're in a very humid climate. Now, I add a little bit less than an eighth of a teaspoon. I know that's not super precise, but with the cream of tartar, you have a little bit of wiggle room. And I also like to add a little bit of salt. We're going to add an eighth teaspoon. This is just table salt. I'm gonna add this in right here. Salt also can help stabilize the egg whites as they're whipping, but I really like it because it adds flavor to the macarons. And so many macaron shells out there are completely flavorless. A little bit of salt goes a long way. We're going to stir everything together again on medium speed for another thirty seconds. Now if you notice your cream of tartar does not get completely beaten up before you start adding your sugar, don't panic. It's not a big deal. It will get completely dissolved as we add the sugar. And now we are going to start introducing our granulated sugar. You need ninety five grams of granulated sugar for today's recipe. If you can find caster or superfine sugar, that works really well. That's even preferable. It's just really hard for me to find out where I live. I am going to gradually add this powdered (***granulated***) sugar while I run my mixer on low speed, and I'm just going to add it about a tablespoon, a little less than a tablespoon at a time. After each tablespoon, I'm going to beat the mixture for thirty to forty seconds before I add the next tablespoon. My mixer actually has a timer on it that tells me exactly how long it's been running, which is super helpful because normally I'm just counting this off in my head. Now as you whip your egg whites, you're going to notice a lot more foam. And eventually, they will become opaque and white, and, ultimately, we're going to get to stiff peaks, but I don't want to get ahead of myself yet. Alright, by the time you've added the last of your sugar, you will likely have noticed a lot of thickening happening, a lot of changes happening with your egg whites. You won't have stiff peaks yet, but we're getting there. You can tell we're getting there and the mixture is totally opaque now. Here's where I like to add my flavoring and any food coloring. I’m going to add a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and you do not need to add food coloring for macarons, but most people do. If you do opt for food coloring, gel food coloring is really one of the best ways to go. Liquid food coloring can really weigh down your meringue. It can make your batter too wet pretty quickly. So I like gel because a little bit goes a long way. And today, I'm just going to be adding three drops of AmeriColor Electric Pink. Now, I am going to continue to beat my mixture on medium speed, maybe a notch above medium, until I have stiff peaks, and I'll show you what that looks like. Now how long it takes to reach stiff peaks really depends on a lot of things. It depends on your mixer. Depends on the humidity in your kitchen, so I don't like to give an exact amount of time. Instead, we're going to be looking for the meringue to be behaving a certain way. What I like to see is distinct ripples being left behind, trails left in the wake of my beaters, which we're starting to see here. And when I lift the beaters out of the bowl, the peak that forms should hold firm and not fold over. These are folding a little bit too much for my liking, so I'm going to keep mixing. Let's take a look. The mixture is getting kind of glossy and shiny and look at that peak that's formed. Can you see that in the camera? I’ll put my hand in front of it. It's staying tall. The peaks in the bowl are staying tall. So I am going to stop mixing here. So now we can add our almond flour, powdered sugar mixture I like to do this in three parts, so I'll just add about a third of it—doesn't have to be exact here. Alright, now grab yourself a spatula. I'm okay using silicone at this point just not before our meringue is whipped, and we are going to start folding together the meringue and our almond flour mixture. Now in the beginning, we're just going to do this a couple times until this mixture is absorbed by the meringue. You don't have to be too heavy handed here. Once it's mostly combined, I'll add the next third. Fold this in. I'm scraping the sides and I'm going through the middle of the mixture because I want to get all of it. I don't want any sitting on the bottom of the bowl. And now, finally, we'll add the last bit of our almond flour mixture. Get that all in there. Now I'll fold again until everything is mostly combined, again, going around the sides, scraping through the middle. And what we're doing here is a process referred to by the French as macaronage. I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. I like to think I'm pronouncing it with my American accent. What this means is we are simply deflating the batter. I know, we went through all that work to whip up our egg whites and now we're just deflating them. It's all part of the process and it's very worth it. However, since we're deflating them, I don't want to just be folding at this point. Now I'm going to start taking some of that batter and smushing it against the side of the bowl and you can see the little air pockets there. We're going to be mostly eliminating these during this process. So I'll go around the sides, cut through the middle and scrape the bottom of the bowl, and then I'll just smush the batter. You can see, we're just working those air pockets out of this batter. Through the middle, smush the sides, scrape that all down, scrape the bottom, and just repeat the process of smushing the batter. Now we need this batter to reach a certain state before we can pipe it and bake it into our macaron shells. What it's going to look like is it's going to start to become smoother and shinier, and it is going to ribbon off of the spatula without breaking. This is still a little bit too stiff, but we're actually pretty close here. I’m going to pause here because I wanna show you an example of batter that isn't quite ready yet, in case this is helpful. So I'll take my spatula and I'm going to start drizzling it off and I want to make sure that I can make a figure eight with the batter —just literally draw an eight with the batter. You can see it broke, so I know, at this point, I still need to go at least a little bit further. But let's just say I was able to make that eight. What I'll do is I'll watch these edges and I'll count for fifteen seconds. After fifteen seconds, the edges should have really softened and the batter should be flowing together. It be flowing back into the rest of the batter. But here after fifteen seconds, the edges are still really defined and sharp, so I know I'm not ready. I can tell I'm getting close though, so I'm just going to do another five to ten folds and smushes, and then I'm going to check it again. You wanna be careful that you don't overdo this because if you do, you're going to into other problems like macarons that spread too much or have wet looking tops. So proceed with caution and you can start checking every five folds. Alright, let's check this again. So here it is ribbonning smoothly off of my spatula. Let's try that figure eight again. We have our eight. I can see the batter is flowing. That's what I like to see. And if I'm counting…after fifteen seconds, the edge has lost a lot of its definition. It's almost all the way back into the batter—but you can still make out the eight. It's just a lot flatter. Okay, it's now time to pipe our macarons. You are going to need a large piping bag and I recommend getting yourself a nice sized open tip. This is the Ateco 804. It's my favorite one to use for piping macarons. I don't have an extra set of hands, so I like to just grab myself a large glass. I’ll drop this right in here. And we can pour our macaron batter right in. It should flow nicely into that bag. A little awkward because I normally turn this towards myself, but I want you guys to see this. Alright, I have my macaron batter piped. Grab yourself a baking pan now and line it with just some parchment paper. Some people use silpat. I personally don't love my results with silpat as much as I like it with parchment paper. And do make sure that you cut your parchment paper so it fits nicely in the pan. You don't want an extra large piece that's like sitting up on the sides or your macarons are not going to bake properly. They need to be completely flat. Now to help keep my parchment paper in place, one thing I like to do is I like to take a little bit of the meringue and just dab a small bit in each corner. And this will hold the parchment paper down. It helps when I'm piping. It helps when I go to bang the pans a little bit later on. It’s a little bit of a pain to clean, but just run some water over it, let it sit for a couple of seconds and it dissolves right off. Make sure you flatten that. And then to pipe our macarons, we are going to hold the bag straight up and down, and we are going to pipe a circle. It’s about one and a half inches in diameter. And we're not going to pull the bag straight up. Don't do that or you're going to be left with a little peak that doesn't look super great. Instead, we are going to flick our wrist to make a little bit of a “c.” If you still notice a little bit of a peak that's fine, that will settle down. But this technique is a good way to help prevent hollows and help prevent misshapen macarons. Now, you need to firmly bang the pans before they go in the oven, right after you finish piping each of them. You can bang them directly on your counter, but my kid is napping right now, so to save a little bit on the noise, I just set down two towels and I am going to bang these pretty heavily on the towels. I'll show you. So I'm very, very firmly, I'm using a lot of force to bang the pans, and I'll do this about four or five times. And you can see these little air bubbles are coming to the surface and popping and any little peaks that formed should be settling back down into the macaron. The tops should look nice and smooth, so this pan is done. I'll set it aside and I'll pipe my next sheet. I find that I typically fill three standard sized cookie sheets with this recipe. Sometimes I get a little bit more than that. When you're piping your macarons, you wanna space them about two inches apart. Some people like to use a template to make sure they're getting all of their macarons exactly the same shape. You can certainly do that. I just eyeball it. And since we're pressing straight down, it really helps keep the circles nice and symmetrical. And even by just eyeballing it, you are probably going to end up with plenty of macarons that match up when you go to make your sandwiches. And now the macarons need to rest. Now some recipes say you do not need to rest. Anytime I've tried to put my macarons right in the oven, they have volcanoed and cracked on me. So I really think resting is important. So what is resting? We are just going to let them sit until they form a skin. You will know they're ready to go in the oven when you run your finger across the surface and it's completely dry. It shouldn't feel tacky. Now these were just piped, so they're definitely going to be wet and not ready. It's winter time where I am right now, so these typically dry pretty quickly. It usually takes about thirty minutes before they are ready to go in the oven. While they're resting, I will get my oven preheating to three hundred and twenty five degrees Fahrenheit. Make sure the center rack is available because that's where we will be baking the macarons. We're just going to bake them one tray at a time. Okay, so it's been thirty minutes, so let's take a look at our shells. If I swipe my finger over the surface, it's completely dry, not sticky, not tacky. These are ready to bake. So we'll take this over to our three twenty five degree Fahrenheit oven, where they're going to bake for ten to eleven minutes. Now most ovens do not bake evenly, so I recommend halfway through baking, you rotate your pan. When your macarons are finished baking, the feet that have formed should not appear wet, they should look dry. Also, if you very lightly press on one of your macarons, it may give very slightly, but it shouldn't collapse in on itself and the feet shouldn't fall. Now sometimes if I'm really not sure if my macarons are done, I will peel back a bit of the parchment and fold over one of the macarons. And what I wanna see here is that the macaron bottom comes off cleanly and it's not sticking to the pan. I can tell that that's finished baking, it doesn't look wet. Now let the macarons cool on the baking sheet completely. While their cooling is also a good time to prepare your favorite filling, if you haven't already done that. There are many great filling options. I will make sure to include some of those in my blog post, but my personal favorite is white chocolate buttercream. And once you have baked all of your macarons, we are going to want to go ahead and pair them off and make sure we get similar sized macarons for our sandwiches. As you can see, I didn't get them all exactly the same size, but they're pretty close. So I wanna show you what the inside of your macaron should look like. It should be nice and full. The top should not be fragile, but it should give a little bit under your teeth. If yours are hollow or not perfect, don't worry. Usually maturing them in the refrigerator for twenty four hours will do the trick and fix them up. Before we do that though, we want to fill them. As I mentioned, I am using my white chocolate buttercream. I know white chocolate has a reputation for being too sweet. I find this to not be too sweet at all and it pairs so nicely with the macarons. Just pipe a little bit right in the center and we'll repeat with the rest of our macarons. Now after filling your macarons, the recommendation is that you place them in an airtight container and let them sit in the refrigerator for at least twenty four hours. This process is called maturing the macarons. It helps to soften the shell, and if your shells are a little bit hollow, it'll fill them as well and to close-up any gaps that might be there. I do recommend that if you've refrigerated them, bring them to room temperature for about fifteen to thirty minutes before enjoying. They just taste best that way. Now do I always mature my macarons? No, I do not. But I do wanna make sure you understand what the typical process is and what your supposed to do, especially if this is your first time making them. Today's recipe was a little bit long. I tried to include as many helpful tips as possible and I will have a detailed blog post with even more information if you want to read that before beginning. Macarons do take some practice. Your technique is so important, so don't be discouraged if they don't come out perfectly the first time, just take notes and try again. I really hope you guys enjoyed today's recipe as much as I have. If you try it out, please leave me a comment. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you have any questions. I always love hearing from you. Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you next time. Okay, this is my favorite part. I could not be more excited for you to try this. That’s so good. And they haven't even matured.
