Jolanda learns to cook. A self-experiment, part 5
20.11.2017
Translation: machine translated
As announced in the last text, I'm not only learning to cook, but also to bake. To break up the series of meat- and fish-based kitchen finger exercises with something sweet, today I'm tinkering with dessert and making my first attempt at making macarons.
As I have heard from all sides and read on various baking blogs, macarons place very special demands on the baker. Nothing should be left to chance! If the quantities of ingredients are not correct down to the last gram, if you use too many eggs or the wrong sugar, you can quickly end up with a macaron fiasco. In order not to put my still young and fragile relationship with the kitchen to the test too much, I call in some help: my former work colleague Daniela, a real baking talent. With the support of the almost-professional, it'll all work out!
Since good planning is everything this time, I take a more thoughtful approach than usual: I buy the ingredients days before the big event so that I can set aside the eggs, which the recipe requires to be at least five days old. The evening before, I start sifting the almost one hundred grams of almonds required for around forty macarons so that they are fine enough for a flawless macaron shell surface.
However, when Daniela arrives, I get my first scolding. Instead of peeled almonds, I bought an ordinary bag of unpeeled, ground almonds. I now learn that unpeeled almonds are problematic for light-coloured macarons because the darker almond pieces make the surface of the macaron look unsightly and blotchy. However, as we want to bake chocolate macarons, my strict coach turns a blind eye, only to reprimand me again shortly afterwards for not sifting the (already dodgy) almonds finely enough. The punishment follows immediately: I have to sieve all the almond powder again. As my under-equipped kitchen doesn't have a fine-meshed sieve, I actually have to press the whole lot through a tiny tea strainer. Interim conclusion: Good preparation pays off - just like having sensible kitchen equipment.
While the tea strainer and I work out the precious almond powder gram by gram, Daniela takes care of the filling, called ganache. She has the much easier job than me. Bring the cream to the boil, pour it over the chocolate pieces, let it melt, whisk it in and put it in the fridge until further notice. Making the shell dough is much more difficult! We mix together the precisely weighed almonds, icing sugar (also sieved) and cocoa powder with meticulous precision. My kitchen scales are given special prominence in this endeavour. We are also very precise with the eggs. Exactly 72 grams of egg whites need to be beaten into snow. This gives my mixer another opportunity to prove itself. While it had disappointed me with its wild splattering during my last attempt at cooking with a hand blender, this time it does a much better job with the beaters and surprises us with cement-hard egg whites in a matter of seconds. We now mix this with the weighed powders to form a dough and use a piping bag to create tiny circles of dough on a tray.
We leave these to dry briefly and then bake them for exactly 13 minutes. While the shells are cooling, stir the ganache and pour it into a piping bag. Then find a partner for each shell and combine the two with the filling.
If you want to start snacking right away, you will be bitterly disappointed. The macarons don't taste all that special when fresh - the flavours first have to develop and bind together by resting in the fridge. In terms of appearance, however, I am overwhelmed: The macarons look outstanding! The fact that I am capable of something like this is more than surprising to me, and the successful handicraft fills me with childish joy. The surface of the shell is smooth and the consistency of the filling is perfect. To be fair, I have to admit that without Daniela's courageous intervention, I probably wouldn't have made a single macaron. With my talent for improvisation, I would have used too little egg white, not sieved the almonds properly and probably wouldn't have had the patience to let the freshly baked shells cool down before processing them.
Now there are agonising hours of roaming around in front of the fridge. When will the macarons finally be ready for tasting? In the end, our patience runs out and we make our move. The flavour of the macarons is also more than convincing - a real chocolate explosion. So the hard work was worth it after all! And the conclusion: Once again - the recipe is always right! And by now, even I should realise that. I've also realised that with enough patience and care in the kitchen, you can work wonders. But will I be able to muster this without strict supervision during the finale? Only time will tell!
I like to get to the bottom of things, sometimes even with diving goggles and snorkel. Nature is my home, regardless of rain, temperature or time of day. I like to be on the road, sometimes even deliberately off track.
Cooking
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Food
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