Getting Started

This smooth, velvety ganache is a perfect—yet slightly nontraditional—filling for chocolate macarons. It's unique in that it's made with roasted Dutch cocoa powder, with extra cocoa butter and soy lecithin added in, whereas traditional ganache recipes call for pouring warm cream over chocolate until it melts. (To learn more about traditional ganaches and how they work, read [The Science of Emulsion](https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/science-of-emulsion).)

In this recipe, we added quite a bit of cocoa butter and just a touch of soy lecithin to soften and emulsify the ganache, and create the gooey, collapsible center we expect of great macarons. We love this recipe because it yields a rich, complex flavor profile that's unique to roasted cocoa powder, and reminds us of Oreo cookies. 

Try it without roasting the cocoa if you prefer a sweeter macaron—ours has a pleasant bitterness that comes from roasting. And if you don't have soy lecithin, the mouthfeel won't be quite as smooth, but the recipe will still work.

Roasted Cocoa Ganache

Tant Pour Tant

French Macaron Cookie Base

Baking French Macarons

French Macaron Assembly

Your First French Macarons

Corn ganache is simple: Take fresh or canned corn (they taste very different, but you can’t go wrong with either), and add amylase. Amylase breaks down the natural starches in the corn, and converts them into sugar. The result is a basic corn syrup, but with a rich, complex corn flavor. Then, turn the syrup into caramel, and use it in anything from a cocktail to a ganache. 

ChefSteps development chef Ben Johnson created this recipe in homage to his love for making whiskey. When you make whiskey, you need to make beer first. When you make beer from 100% grain—which most people don’t do anymore—you make your own malt and malted grains, which generate amylase. Amylase is what you add to any complex starch system to break it down into fermentable sugars. Ben noticed that when he combines grain and amylase to make the initial mash for beer, it tastes a lot like corn flakes, and it is delicious. 

So he thought, why not take anything starchy (like grain, corn, potatoes, or even a banana) and use amylase to transform its starches into sugar in an unrefined way, so it would retain all the character of the original ingredient? The result: Sweet corn syrup, which we made into caramel, which we then made into ganache. Boom.

Sweet Corn Ganache

To make traditional macaron cookies, you combine equal parts ground-up almonds and powdered sugar to create the mixture known as [link https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/french-macarons#/tant-pour-tant tant pour tant]. For a fun new riff on a confectionary classic—and a fun new cooking challenge for you—we swap in pistachios here instead. The recipe also deviates from our standard [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/french-macaron-cookie-base macaron method] in the way we make the meringue. Here, we use the French technique in place of the Italian one. Whereas the Italians like to combine egg whites with cooked sugar to create a stable meringue, in France they just incorporate granulated sugar right into the egg whites. The result is a cookie that’s a little less chewy and a little more brittle. (There’s a Swiss meringue method too—it involves a double boiler, lax banking laws, and no small amount of yodeling.) 

Truth be told, replacing almonds with pistachios makes for a more challenging process—especially when it comes to getting the moisture and the oven temperature just right. So employ some patience and consider doing a few test runs if you’re planning to serve these to guests. Once you’ve mastered them and stuffed them with our addictive [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pistachio-nutella Pistachio Butter], however, you’ll find yourself making them again and again—whenever you need a sweet little nutty treat that’s bound to impress.

Pistachio Macaron Cookie Base

Rainbow chip frosting is a classic American birthday tradition. We honestly don’t even _want_ to know how they make those yummy colorful flecks, but we’ve always loved them! Ours is an elevated rainbow chip frosting, made with lemon, lime, and orange zest for a bright flavor and a more elegant confetti look. 

Macarons more traditionally contain French buttercream filling, but we find that it’s awfully finicky—a little too warm or too cold and the emulsion breaks. American buttercream—which we call frosting—has a firmer texture, and is much easier to do well. 

Since we love American buttercream frosting anyway, we thought: Why not make a colorful confetti macaron filled with frosting that pays homage to the old birthday classic? The flavor is definitely different, but the rainbow "chip" effect still makes us smile. We can almost hear the music when we take a bite: _Happy birthday, dear ChefSteps..._

Rainbow Chip Frosting

This jam is equally at home on a macaron cookie as it is on a freshly-baked brioche or biscuit. Its pleasant sweet-and-tart flavor and vibrant ruby red color make for a deliciously bright and fresh homemade filling. We like to keep whole seeds in our jam for added textural intrigue, but you can remove them if you prefer.

If you’re a seasoned jam-maker, you’ll notice that we use malic acid instead of the traditional lemon juice or citric acid. Malic acid is a naturally-occurring acid found in apples, cherries, and many other fruits. It has a different sourness than citric acid, and it gets your mouth salivating, enhancing the overall flavor of the jam.

We decorated the cookie with a matching red food coloring for a bright, uniform look.

Raspberry Jam

This delightfully sweet-and-salty, silky-smooth ganache reminds us of Milk Maid candy. In this recipe, we caramelize the milk solids in the cream, rather than caramelizing the sugar itself and adding fresh cream and butter later, as you would to make regular caramel. In fact, _dulce de leche_ literally means "candy of milk," while the word _caramel_ has been traced to the Medieval Latin word for sugar cane, signifying the difference between this rich, creamy confection and the caramel most Americans are used to. 

This ganache is designed to pipe into macarons, but it would work great as an ice cream topping, too. 

Decorate plain macarons with gold satin decorating powder for a refined finish.

Dulce de Leche Ganache

For this traditional-style ganache, we use all dark chocolate to offset the sweetness of macaron cookie shells. The finished product is a deliciously bittersweet, creamy filling that’s perfect for macarons.

Click to read about the [link https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/french-macarons/#/science-of-ganache science of ganache] and get troubleshooting tips.

Traditional Chocolate Ganache

While not super common in the States, **almond paste is a common confectioner’s ingredient in a lot of culinary traditions**, including the French one. Also common in France: Nutella, the chocolate-and-hazelnut spread that kids there consume as often as their American counterparts do peanut butter. 

When Grant and Nick were developing recipes for the [link http://www.americanpistachios.org/ American Pistachio Growers], they came up with the idea of creating **a butter that was sort of a pistachio-flavored riff on Nutella—creamy and spreadable, but with a nutty richness that’s distinctly adult**. It makes an awesome filling for [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pistachio-macarons pistachio-flavored macarons], but you can also dunk strawberries in it, serve it as a dip for pretzels, spread it all over a warm crepe, or just find a spoon and go to town the way—let’s face it—most of us do when there’s a jar of Nutella hanging around. 

While it’s not complicated to make, this recipe does require a confectioner’s device known as a conche or [link http://cocoatown.com/product/cocoat-melanger-ecgc-12sl/ melanger], which we know isn’t a staple of every household kitchen. **You can often find conches used online**, however, so if you’re interested in confections, we encourage you to consider investing—but only if you want to stop the show at your next dinner party with some Pistachio Butter–stuffed profiteroles.

Smooth & Creamy American-Pistachio Butter

Other Flavors

Let’s start with the basics: A [link https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/french-macarons/landing#/ macaron] (pronounced mack-a-ROHN) is a confection made up of two round, flat, almond-flour-based cookies sandwiching an emulsified filling like ganache or jam. Any variation in color or flavor is simply a variation in the filling, plus some food coloring added to the shells. A macaro**o**n (two *o*s; pronounced mack-a-ROON) is a mounded cookie made with shredded coconut and often dipped in chocolate. **Two very different cookies, two very different appearances, flavors, and recipes—but with remarkably similar names.** So what gives? We wondered the very same thing, and when we went in pursuit of the answer, we found that the two cookies actually have much in common, including a multinational, multigenerational history, some French monks, and—wait for it—anal secretions.

NOTE: In his [link http://languageoffood.blogspot.com/2011/04/macaroons-macarons-and-macaroni.html fantastic article about the etymology of *macaron*], Stanford Linguistics and Computer Science professor Dan Jurafsky dives deep into the history of these two cookies and also explores how the root words may connect them to that venerable dance tradition of the nineties, the [link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiBYM6g8Tck Macarena]. Needless to say, Jurafsky is the leading expert on the topic, and when you’re done looking at our cat anus doodles, you should check out his James Beard–nominated book, [link http://amzn.to/1HXafuq *The Language of Food*]. All hail Jurafsky!

*Which mac do you prefer? Tell us in the comments below! (And share your favorite macaro**o**n recipe if you have one!)*

Macarons & Macaroons: What’s the Difference?

Science of Meringue

Science of Ganache

Science of Pectin

Nerd Out! Culinary Science & History

Discussion

More Resources

Learn to make these gorgeous, delectable French cookies with entertaining and informative high-definition videos and succinct step-by-step instructions.

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