Macaron Madness: 10 Batches in 2 Weeks

Everybody describes making macarons as difficult.  Everybody also has a set of rules for making macarons: the egg whites must be aged! the egg whites must be at room temperature! you must sift the powdered sugar and almond mixture at least three times! the French meringue method is better!  no, the Italian method is better!

I took two week off work for the holidays at the end of December and made lots of plans, of which I actually did none. What I ended up doing was lying in bed and binge-watching the Great British Bake Off.  This is a fantastic show and I recommend that anybody who is into amateur baking should give it a try.  It is literally just about baking, and the judges' comments are very helpful.  One contestant made a quick comment while making macarons, which got me thinking about how all of my macarons came out perfectly in DC and failed miserably in SF.  So I decided to fix the problem.

An important point to know is that macarons (mah-kah-rohns) and macaroons (mah-ka-roons) are not the same thing.  They're derived from the same word which is why the names are similar, but the cookies are not:

This picture is supposedly from I Do Believe I Came With A Hat but I got it from this Pintrest page.

If you're Ashkenazi Jewish like me, you are mostly likely unfortunately aware of macaroons because they don't contain any flour and are commonly served as dessert during Passover, straight out of the Manischewitz tin.  They are terrible.

Macarons, on the other hand, are small sugar bomb sandwiches that have a softer filling and a crunchy outer shell of meringue.  It's these shells that have the reputation for being so difficult to get right.

This blog entry is a little bit different from the others.  It only has one recipe and details all of the various things I did to get these suckers to come out right.

Gnocchi: Not As Italian As You'd Think (+ Pesto)

There's a very simple rule for eating pasta: thin pasta, thick sauce; thick pasta, thin sauce.  You eat gnocchi with a thin sauce, even though it's not pasta.  Gnocchi are little dumplings, not noodles.  They're usually listed with the pasta on the menu at Italian restaurants and sold with pasta in grocery store, which creates some confusion.

There really isn't a stereotypical "Italian" dinner any more than there is an "American" dinner.  Sure, some Americans really do eat green bean casserole made with Campbell's cream of mushroom soup and hamburgers for dinner in the same way that some Italians really do eat tomatoes and mozzarella and chicken cacciatore with tiramisu for dessert.  But there is considerable regional differences in both American and Italian cooking which makes it difficult to say what Americans or Italians "eat for dinner".  Most cookbooks and travel magazines do the best they can, writing very broad descriptions that aren't wrong but aren't really right, either.

In these descriptions, an Italian dinner has a lighter first course which is usually some kind of pasta/gnocchi/soup and a heavier main course which is a meat dish.  Gnocchi may not be pasta but it is cooked similarly and used interchangeably with pasta in the first course.

Most people know the potato version of gnocchi, but they can be made with lots of ingredients, including ricotta, flour, and pumpkin.  Tuscany has a version of gnocchi called malfatti, which are ricotta and spinach dumplings.  The idea of small dumplings made from flour was spread across Europe by the Roman empire and most European countries have some version of them. If you've ever had spätzle, then you know what I'm talking about.

Although potato gnocchi are the most commonly made version of gnocchi, potatoes are not indigenous to Italy and weren't introduced until the 16th century.  Many of the food items that we consider to be historically Italian are actually made with foods from the New World, like tomatoes and potatoes.  When new food items became available, Italians worked them into their older recipes which is how we get pizza with tomato sauce or potato gnocchi.