Falling in Love with French Macarons

My love affair with French macarons has officially begun. Last week I decided to dive in and make my first batch of macarons. Keep in mind that I had never had a French macaron before this.

Needless to say, they are not quite the ideal French macaron that you see in pastry shops. I'm not quite sure what happened, but I thought the cookies would flatten out some in the oven...they didn't.

Being the scientist I am, I had to do some more research. Reading several articles online, I now know that French macarons are apparently one of the hardest pastries to master. This made me feel a little better after my disastrous looking (yet still delicious) first batch.

Attempt #2 led me to the following recipe, which I now consistently follow. It is derived from Not So Humble Pie's recipe, but converted to volumetric measurements rather than mass because I don't have a kitchen scale:

• 2 large egg whites
• 2 tbsp + 1/2 tsp granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup + 2 tbsp + 3/4 tsp almond flour
• 1 cup + 2 tbsp + 1/4 tsp powdered sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

These were my results from attempt #2 where I replaced lemon extract for the vanilla extract.

I filled these with a store bought Pillsbury vanilla frosting. The cookies definitely look more like French macarons, but still leave something to be desired.

At this point, I was determined to perfect the French macaron. I got serious with my baking and began taking notes on each of my macaron batches like a laboratory notebook...monotonous at times, but worth the trouble in the end.

I won't bore you with each of my attempts (I'm to 8 different attempts so far), but I'll give you my general findings from all of them:

1.  Don't substitute JUMBO egg white in place of the recipe's LARGE egg whites, even if you try to compensate with new calculations for ingredients. For some reason, this just wouldn't work for me. If you're following my recipe, make sure to only use LARGE egg whites.

2.  The ideal bake time/position for the macarons in my gas oven is on the middle rack at 300F for 3 min., 275F for 8 min., flip the tray around, and then let it go for another 4 minutes at 275F. Of course, this will vary for each oven (meaning I can never move, or my oven must come with me).

I put it at 300F first because this helps create the foot. And I drop the temperature down so that it can cook the insides of the cookie without burning the outside. To avoid creating an air pocket in the cookie, the insides must be baked enough that they don't collapse and pull away from the wall when the tray is taken out of the oven to cool.

My husband thought to explain this process as being similar to cooking a steak. That you want to initially sear the meat and then slowly cook the insides to perfection. I don't know anything about cooking meat, so I'm going to take his word on this :)

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Those are my only stable conclusions for now. There are a lot of other techniques that I read about (letting the cookies rest before going into the oven, aging egg whites, etc.), but I need to do a bit more research on those. I'll keep you updated as I continue on my journey with French macarons and I'll post more pictures of them.