How do I make Pistachio Macaroons?

...I'm glad you asked! These pretty leaf-green treats were a yummy addition to the weekend.

There are a few recipes floating around out there and I've had mixed success. My first pistachio macaroons were lumpy, and an anaemic, queasy green, like the colour of someone's face just before they get really seasick. So this time I found a better recipe, was more careful, got rid of the lumps and most importantly went wild with green food colouring so that the 'queasy green' turned into a nice, determined-looking pastel green. Heaps better!










You need a kick ass food processor or blender with heavy blade and a good motor ... Pistachios are not available ready-ground so you have to grind from scratch and they need to be really, really fine.

As with my post on chocolate macaroons, I found that using an Italian cooked meringue was far better than the French, or uncoiled meringue method, because it's more stable and doesn't sink when you're folding it in to the tant pour tant mixture.
















Tant pour tant:                     
100g ground pistachios
80g ground almonds
200 g icing sugar
green food colouring (gel is best)                     

Italian meringue:         
200g caster sugar
75ml water
 2 x 80g egg whites*
*Measure out the egg whites to get 160g (usually about 4 egg whites). You will use this in two separate stages, hence, 2 x 80g.
Pistachio buttercream: 
250g unsalted butter
75g icing sugar
80g ground pistachios 
green food colouring (gel is best)      

Preheat your oven to 150C, and line three metal baking trays with baking paper. 
Start by grinding your pistachios, with a small amount of the icing sugar, in the food processor. The sugar is useful because otherwise the oil comes out of the nuts and makes them sticky and harder to grind finely. As you are grinding them, check the fineness of the grind - you're looking for a sandy consistency like in the pic above. Add the ground almonds about halfway through the process.
 When the pistachios and almonds are ground very finely add the rest of the icing sugar and blend the tant pour tant thoroughly. Then pass the tant pour tant mixture through a fine sieve. This may seem obsessive but I assure you, it really does result in smooth, well formed macaroons. Do it!




Whisk 80g of the egg whites lightly, just until they are foamy, and combine them with the tant pour tant mixture, stirring well. You should end up with a thick mixture that is difficult to stir. 

At this point start adding your green food colouring. I use gel colouring which is available from cake decorating suppliers in little pots for about $5 per colour. There are different chades of green, I used leaf green. 


Use the colouring sparingly and remember the golden rule: you can always add more, but you can never subtract it once it's in! But conversely, remember that adding the meringue later will lighten the colour, so make it a bit darker than you want it to end up. Then put this mixture to one side and start the meringue.












For the Italian, or cooked, meringue, take the other 80g of egg whites and beat them to stiff peak while you make the sugar syrup.

Place the castor sugar and the water in a small saucepan and bring to the boil on a high heat. You need to bring it to soft ball stage or 115C. You will see this happen through the change from a watery consistency to a thicker, glossier mixture. You will notice the bubbles looking slower and softer.

Once you see this take the pan off the heat. When it's off the heat and stopped boiling, it should look like this pic. 


Then pour the hot syrup onto the beaten egg whites in a thin stream, beating constantly, to combine. When you have finished adding the syrup, keep beating for a few minutes. Beware,  the syrup will heat up your bowl and utensils.






 
You now have a beautiful creamy glossy meringue!

Stir a quarter of the meringue into the tant pour tant, just to lighten the mixture a bit, then lightly fold in the rest. Do not over stir the mixture. 

Fill a piping bag with the mixture by draping the bag open inside a large mug or jug and spooning the mixture in. (Apologies, the pic shows chocolate macaroon mixture, not pistachio, but I wanted to include it here so you got the idea of how to neatly fill the bag)

Cut the end of the piping bag to make a hole about 1cm wide, then hold the piping bag vertically and pipe straight downwards onto baking trays lined with baking paper. As you can see, I was aiming for perfect circles, but the mixture was a little runny and tended to spread a bit far which can make the shape harder to achieve. 


Then leave the piped macaroons to rest BEFORE BAKING for half an hour, to allow them to form a skin over the top. This is a very important step - if you don't leave them long enough, they won't form this skin, and the air inside them will, when heated, just pop through the top of the macaroon and crack them open instead of staying inside and making them rise up on their little 'feet' as they should. 

Bake for exactly 14 minutes, then remove from the oven. Slide the entire baking paper sheet onto a slightly wet benchtop and let it sit there for a few minutes - this will make the macaroons easier to remove from the paper. 
After five minutes, gently peel the paper back from the macaroons one by one, or, if this is getting too sticky, use a small metal spatula to lift the macaroons off the sheet. 

Make the buttercream next. Cream the butter with electric beaters until whipped up and pale, then add the sugar and ground pistachios. When this is well combined, add green colouring sparingly until you reach a shade you're happy with. 


Then sandwich pairs of macaroons together with the buttercream. 

It's worth being extra careful with the matching up of the pairs - slight variations in size and shape can look messy, but if you are completely obsessive like me, you can usually divide up your whole batch into nearly-exact matches. 









These keep really well in the fridge - at least a week (if you can resist them that long). 

There are some FAQs that might help if you encounter problems in my earlier post 'How to make the perfect Chocolate Macaroon"


Happy eating!!

Macaroon Madness.... pistachio v chocolate

Macaroons or ‘macarons’ if you want to be all French about it are possibly the most awesome foodstuff on the planet. 

I know there are many people who would argue with that statement, but I would argue that those people should not be reading this blog. 

Now if you live in a small and mostly un-French place like Tasmania there are limited opportunities to purchase macaroons, and you may be forced to make your own. That is basically why I started to make macaroons.

Macaroons are fiddly and time consuming to make but they are worth it for the enjoyment factor. They also last really well (about 10 days). 

The ones in these photos are chocolate (above) and pistachio (right).

I was a little more careful in shaping the chocolate ones - you can see the pistachio ones are misshapen and a bit weird looking. This was because I was just doling them out on to the oven tray with a teaspoon. You get a much better result if you pipe the mixture out into circles using a wide nozzle. 

The chocolate ones are made by adding cocoa to the basic meringue mix of egg whites, sugar and almond meal. The chocolate buttercream I made by just adding some melted dark chocolate to some creamed butter (unsalted) and icing sugar. In other words it is a butter icing with lots of chocolate in it!

The pistachio macaroons are a bit more tricky. For a start they are a lot more expensive to make because pistachios cost heaps more than almonds (this may be a seasonal thing I guess). Then you have to buy them whole and grind them from scratch. Whatever you do, don't buy salted ones. And don't try to grind them by hand with a mortar and pestle, your arms will drop off. You need to whizz them in a food processor with some icing sugar so they don't get too oily. And then you need to whizz them again. And again. Just saying. 

For the filling in the pistachio macaroons, I discovered that traditional recipes often put a couple of egg yolks in the buttercream along with butter, sugar and some ground pistachios. I was a bit worried about this but it worked really well, I can recommend using the egg yolks as it seems to stabilise the mixture and add an extra smoothness and taste dimension. 

I'll post more pics as I make some more.

Just FYI, I have actually found three places in Tassie that sell macaroons. In Launceston, Tant Pour Tant in Charles St has them but only about once a week and you mostly have to order them specially. In Hobart you can get them at Sweet Envy in Elizabeth St North Hobart, and there is a microbusiness called Ruby’s Macarons (do a search on Facebook, they have a page) who supplies some delis. Companion Bakery at Oatlands also has them sometimes.

Quick comparison between suppliers:

Tant Pour Tant makes very traditional medium sized macaroons, mostly vanilla ones, with a firm buttercream filling. They are similar to  Laurent Patisserie’s in Melbourne.

Sweet Envy’s are smaller and have buttercream filling plus a mystery additional filling of syrup or something, and a huge range of flavours, blackberry, raspberry, lemon, orange, lemon myrtle etc. I love their coffee one especially.

Ruby’s are medium sized, traditional buttercream and they do an awesome salted caramel one that is filled with a soft caramel, outstanding!

Companion is more a rustic style and they are very large, only vanilla, and the filling is a stiff almond paste which I didn’t like very much (sorry Companion, you do awesome sourdough bread and semolina biscuits though).