The Science of Macarons

Macarons are scary. To me, who has admittedly never eaten a macaron, they seemed mysterious and picky. I figured they would take me hours to make, and hundreds of tries to perfect. While the latter is most likely true, I was surprised to find it took only a little over the time I would expect to set aside for making a cake.

Macarons have one core difference that makes them different from two sugar cookies with buttercream in the middle. Macarons are meringues. Meringues are made from whipping egg whites and sugar, and are known for their fluffy, sweet texture. Egg whites are 90% water, the other 10% is made up of proteins and small amounts of vitamins and minerals. But why use just the whites? Egg yolks contain fats that can ruin the meringue. Beating egg whites unroll, or denature, the amino acid chains that make up the whites. This is why, during the process of beating the egg yolks the mixture can triple in size and turns an opaque white. Hydrophobic amino acids in the egg whites coat air bubbles to protect them. Fats, like butter or egg yolks, are also attracted to the air bubbles, but instead of coating them they push other proteins away, destabilizing the foam and leaving air bubbles to pop. Overbeating can also ruin a meringue, as it makes the amino acid net maintaining the air bubbles too tight, squeezing out the water and making the meringue grainy and lumpy. Too much almond flour makes the merengue thick, too much confectioners sugar makes it thin. When “macaronage-ing”, combining our dry ingredients with our egg white mixture, it’s important to be delicate, while still deflating a portion of the air bubbles in our mixture so that the resulting cookies are chewy and not hollow. So, there are a lot of places to go wrong in a macaron, and by looking at my final product I can tell I have yet to master these small differences. To avoid having to track down gel food coloring, I made coffee flavored cookies, using instant espresso as both flavoring and coloring. Before baking the cookies, they need to be left to sit and form slightly hardened outsides. When they’re ready (30 minutes to an 1 hour) you should be able to brush your finger across the top without moving the batter. This helps prevent air from escaping through the top of the cookies during backing, instead directing the air out the bottom. The macarons are done once they can be lifted off the baking sheet without sticking. Once they are completely cooled you can fill them with whatever you choose, traditionally buttercream or ganache. Many recipes caution you from eating the cookies before 24 hours have passed, stating that it needs time to absorb the flavor of your filing of choice. Since mine had clearly already missed certain macaron milestones, I figured I’d try them right away anyways. While the texture and flavor were close to correct (or so I was told by my family because, small oversight in making these, I have no frame of reference for what macarons should actually be like), the presentation was definitely lacking. In the future, I might potentially make a second attempt at macarons, but I will definitely have to try a real macaron first because after making these I may have discovered I don’t actually like macarons.