Diana likes to tell a story about how Nigel Slater helped her overcome her fear of mayonnaise. If you read the Joy of Cooking on mayonnaise, you get a page of 10 point text explaining mayo at a molecular level, along with a couple of mild food safety warnings about not letting the egg rise above 40F and what to do in the likely event that the mayo starts to break. Diana claims to be terrified by this.

If you read Nigel Slater on mayo, he basically lists some ingredients and tells you to start whisking, while chatting about the pleasures of homemade mayo.

The Joy and Mr. Slater give you fundamentally the same recipe – egg yolks, oil, and a certain amount of elbow grease, but many people seem to be intimidated by recipes that gives you precise directions and such a complete explanation of how they work. I’m often told the same thing about pastry recipes – if something involves grams, it’s got to be terrifying and incredibly hard to get right. Some cookbooks, admittedly, play up this tendency, taking a tone which suggests that deviating from their instructions by so much as a letter will lead to certain disaster. Will Goldfarb puts it particularly well.

The other thing about pastry recipes – the cookbook authors are never quite convincing when they assure you that if you follow their instructions, everything will turn out just fine. It’s hard to be reassuring after spending 3 pages explaining why your word is absolute gospel.

So I’m going to let you in on a little secret. With most pastry, even if you fuck up, it still tastes pretty good.

Those macarons I was so excited about? Perfection (which I did not achieve, because they weren’t perfectly round) is purely cosmetic. Every single batch of macs I’ve made – with cracked tops, no feet, disintegrating feet, no tops, rough tops – every single one was far too scarfable for my or anyone else’s good. I’ve made at least a dozen over the last couple years, and these, while the best looking ones, were only marginally tastier than most of the visual disasters.

So this is a recipe that I promise will work – if you weigh your ingredients and if you wait as long as I tell you, and if you trust your oven thermometer and not the oven dial. If you don’t wait as long as I say, or don’t feel like messing around with boiling water and parchment paper, your macs might not look as good as they could – but they’ll still taste fabulous. Cross my heart.

125g pecans or other nuts
125g icing sugar
90g egg whites

225g sugar
75g water
90g egg whites (this is not a misprint – you need 180g egg whites in total, in 2 batches of 90g)

First, make your tant pour tant – put the nuts and icing sugar into a food processor, and allow them to sort out their differences. You don’t want paste – nor should you get it, given the icing sugar in there. You won’t be able to get all the nuts powder fine, and that’s ok – but it should be pretty darn fine when you’re done – like stone-ground cornmeal. Personally, I like to make as much of this as my food processor will hold, then store it in my freezer. (of course, if you bought the nuts ground fine already, you can just mix them with the icing sugar)

Prep a piping bag with a 1/2” round tip, and at line 2 full size cookie sheets (12 x 18”) with parchment paper.

Weigh out the tant pour tant in a large bowl (this is where you’ll do your mixing) and plop the first 90g of egg whites on top. Let it sit there and come to room temperature.

Make your Italian meringue. If you’re brave, you can do this with a hand-held mixer. Ideally you want a stand mixer, and it is flat out a bad idea to do this by hand. Put the sugar in a small, very clean saucepan, and gently pour the water in. Brush down spatters with a pastry brush. Put it over high heat and cook till it reaches 238F (an easy test, if you don’t have a thermometer, is to dip a fork in, and try to blow a bubble through the tines – it should just about form a bubble when you blow). Simultaneously, start beating the egg whites on medium speed. You want them to hit soft peaks around the same time that the syrup reaches temperature. Gently pour the syrup down the side of the bowl – do not scrap down the inevitable spatter – and beat till it’s at room temperature. This will take about 5-10 minutes.

All at once, fold the meringue into the tant pour tant. Yes, it will deflate some, and yes, this is fine. You want a uniform mix that’s just barely runny. It should slip off your spatula, but reluctantly.

Fill the piping bag, and pipe macarons of the size you desire – hold the bag vertical, tip about 1/2” above the tray, and squeeze. Stop short of your desired diameter, and yank the bag up – it’s a perky, bouncing motion, which, if you’ve stopped squeezing the bag, will cause the thread of macaron batter to sever. This, as you might have surmised, is easier to demonstrate than to describe. Go for perky and skippity.

If your batter is the right consistency, the little tips of batter left by the piping bag should gently subside into the rest of the macarons. If not, pat them down with a wet fingertip.

Now, and only now, preheat the oven to 350F (the oven rack should be centered). This is a fail-safe way of making sure your macarons long enough for the necessary skin to form – 25-30 minutes. While you wait, dust the tops with icing sugar.

Bake for 12 or so minutes, till the tops feel firm, with another minute for insurance. As they finish, boil a cup of water in a container with a pouring spout.

As soon as the macarons come out of the oven, lift a corner of the parchment paper and pour a small amount of water between the parchment and the tray. Tilt the tray around to moisten the whole sheet. Let the macs rest for a few seconds, then peel them off. If they’re still proving troublesome, invert the parchment on a countertop (remember to breathe while you do this, it really helps) and peel the parchment off the macs.

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"Macarons, revisited" was written on 24 Jun 2007 and filed in General, Techniques / Recipes