French Macarons are the new cupcake

If you love those beautiful photos of those airy cookies, please read this. It’s beautiful. Every last word. Enjoy.

via Stacy Finz of the San Francisco Chronicle.

“I fell in love in Paris. I know it’s a cliche. It’s so much cooler these days to fall in love in a gritty place - say, Death Valley in the summer.

But there was no sand. There was no man.

It all started on the Champs-Elysées at Ladurée, a romantic patisserie, where I spied my heart’s desire. Behind the bakery window twinkled rows and rows of perfectly round cookie sandwiches in pastel greens, bright pinks and vibrant yellows.

“What are those?” I asked, in awe of their dainty beauty.

“Macarons (spelled macaroons in English),” the attendant muttered, with Parisian disdain. They were nothing like the macaroons I knew, flourless kiss-shaped coconut cookies that we ate at Passover.

As I took my first bite I was smitten. The almond-flavored pastry had a texture that was both brittle and chewy. And the fillings - fruit, nut and chocolate ganaches - were concentrated and bold.

When I returned home, I looked for the macaroons everywhere, only to come up empty-handed or with an inferior reproduction. Recently, however, the real thing has been turning up at bakeries all over the country, especially in the Bay Area.

“I think they’re the next cupcake,” says Erin Bailey of the San Francisco Baking Institute, a school for professional and novice bakers.

Alexandre Trouan, a French pastry chef and owner of San Francisco’s L’Artisan, says that up until a year ago, people would look at his macaroons and ask, “What are those little colored hamburgers?” Now his customers are calling them by the French pronunciation and ordering them by the dozen.

Michel Suas, president and co-founder of the Baking Institute, says he’s getting calls from bakers from as far away as South America who want to learn the art of making French macaroons. A French manufacturer is now marketing a macaroon mix for professional bakers, which has made its way into the United States. Suas is afraid that “it will flood the market with an inferior product.”

French macaroons should remain an artisan pastry, not something with a shelf life of five months, he says. Nevertheless, the Parisian macaroon could soon be finding its way onto the bakery aisle at Safeway.

Unlike their coconut counterparts, which are drop cookies made with egg whites and sweetened condensed milk, French macaroons are made with almond meal/flour, powdered sugar, egg whites and food coloring, and are methodically piped onto sheet pans before baking. Once out of the oven, two cookies sandwich a buttercream, ganache or jelly filling.

At patisseries such as Ladurée and Pierre Hermé, the macaroons are aged for two to four days - often in a commercial freezer - before being sold, giving them time to reach the proper texture and flavor.

“They’re very temperamental to make,” says baker Kelli Manukyan, owner of Pamplemousse in Redwood City. “You even have to be in a good mood for them to come out right.”

When the Montreal native opened her French pastry shop 2 1/2 years ago, her clientele didn’t know what to make of her brightly-colored macaroons. On a typical day, she offers as many as 25 flavors, ranging from cassis and caramel to violet and yuzu.

“One Yelper complained that he drove all the way to the Peninsula because he heard about my macaroons, and when he got here they weren’t even coconut,” she says, laughing.

Manukyan says she understands that it will take a while for folks to catch on.

“They’re not like chocolate-chip cookies,” she says. “Even in Paris and Montreal, they’re considered a specialty item, an elite pastry.”

They’ve got a steep price tag to prove it - $1.25 to $1.95 for a cookie no larger than an Oreo.

Juliette Lelchuk, an instructor at the San Francisco Baking Institute, says the price of the cookie reflects the expense of the ingredients - the almond flour Manukyan uses costs $15 a pound wholesale, not to mention the price of her exotic flavored fillings - and the labor. “They’re extremely time intensive,” says Manukyan, who pipes each cookie half by hand.

For the consumer, Lelchuk says, “It’s an indulgence and should always leave you wanting more.”

Even in Paris, where the cookies are made by machine, the price can run as high as 8 euros for a white truffle macaroon at Pierre Hermé. The pastry chef and his self-named bakery have sparked debate among aficionados over whether his innovations have made him the reigning macaroon king. His new cookbook, “Macaron” (published in French by Agnes Vienot; 2008), is already on back order.

“Hermé really spearheaded the modernization of the macaroon,” Suas says.

Making macaroons is as much an art form as it is a baking challenge, even for the accomplished cook, Lelchuk says. A good macaroon should be smooth with no cracks in the pastry. And each cookie round should contain a “foot,” a crackly, puffed second layer that measures about 1/16-inch high.

“If you don’t see a foot, you’ve probably overmixed your batter,” Lelchuk says. “A flat foot either means you overmixed or you underbaked.”

The history of the French macaroon is as elusive as the perfect texture. According to Relais Desserts, a French trade publication for bakers, the cookie was probably developed in the Andalusia region of Spain before the 1492 expulsion of the Jews and was created for Passover, when foods with flour and leavening are forbidden.

Others believe that it was introduced to France by Italy and was made famous by two Carmelite nuns who baked and sold them during the French Revolution to make a living. Relais Desserts says the name macaron probably originates from a combination of the Greek term for “cake of the blessed” and the Italian word macaroni.

France’s King Louis XIV is said to have served macaroons at his wedding. But according to most sources, it wasn’t until 1862, when baker Louis-Ernest Ladurée decided to turn the little cake into a cookie sandwich, that the pastry was popularized.

Until the late 1980s, macaroon flavors were pretty prosaic - chocolate, vanilla, coffee and an occasional raspberry. Hermé, who originally worked at Ladurée, is credited for expanding the macaroon repertoire and even introducing savory versions, like his now faddish ketchup one.

San Francisco baker Trouan says he’s also moving in the savory direction, topping a half macaroon with ingredients such as prosciutto, salmon eggs and delicate cucumber slices. Manukyan is sticking with sweet macaroons and playing around with new flavors - pumpkin for Thanksgiving and cranberry for Christmas.

For her, the cookies are a “luxurious little pleasure” that won’t break the bank.

And as long as she keeps making them, I’ll always have Paris”