Andrew asked if the Macaroons were easy enough for a non-cook bachelor to prepare. The answer is: YES! (Provided you are willing to watch to make sure they don’t burn.)
This recipe makes approximately 2 dozen coconut Macaroons. They are very easy to make. I think they are even Kosher; I know they are gluten free. I adapted this from the recipe on the back of the Ziyad coconut, which is a very finely grated unsweetened coconut. I found it a bit difficult to form balls, so my version has a little more egg white and a little water. The point of the tweak was to make the dough hold together better. I also added vanilla. The Greek section of my grocery store has dry vanillin, and I now prefer that, but you can use vanilla extract.
This recipe is hard to screw up. The two ways you could screw up are a) burning the cookies or b) trying too hard to make them perfect. Do not try to roll these into perfect balls. You will just get frustrated. Just squeeze them into mash them into shape with clean hands or if you are skilled with spoons, I guess you could try to shape them that way.
Recipe:
Collect together your ingredients.
- 2 C. unsweetened coconut.
- 6 T. Sugar or Sugar Substitute (See note.)
- 1/4 t. vanilla or vanillin. (optional)
- Whites from 4 USDA large eggs
- 1T water if coconut is dry.
Steps:
- Preheat oven to 375F. Place racks in the middle positions of oven.
- Spray two cookie sheets with Pam or similar spray oil. Be generous.
- Wash your hands.
- Place all dry ingredients in one large bowl. Stir.
- Add water to egg whites. Add all wet ingredients. Whip a little with a fork.
- Stir wet ingredients into dry ingredients and stir to blend. Using your clean hands, see if you can pack the mixture into a ball. If not, add another tablespoon of water and stir.
- Scoop out about 1/2 T of cookie dough and, using your hands pack into a roughly spherical ball. Place on cookie sheet. Repeat until you have use up all the dough.
- Make sure oven has reached 375F. It it hasn’t wait. You want to minimize the amount of time the heating elements turns on while cooking.
- After oven has reached 375F, place cookie sheets on oven racks. Turn oven down to 350F.
- If your oven temperature is right, the cookies are supposed to take about 10 minutes to cook. For a variety of reasons, cookies are unpredictable. Set timer to 6 minutes. When timer rings, check the cookies. If they aren’t brown yet, set timer for another 2-4 minutes. (How long depends on how brown they were). When cookies are nicely browned, remove from oven. (My examples are on the pale side of done. )
- Allow cookies to cool on sheets. Remove gently from sheets. Eat.
Note: these cookies are very tender and delicate. Unless you are very gentle, you will break some as you remove them from the cookie sheet. Just eat those. 🙂
Note: For low carb version you will need a sugar substitute that mimics the bulk and browning properties of sugar. I recommend 4T Truvia + 2T Poly D fiber + ( 6 drops of from the 2oz bottle of EZ Sweet or 3 packets of Splenda) . Truvia is available at grocery stores and whole foods; it’s a sugar substitute the maintains bulk when you cook. Poly D isn’t really a sweetener, but it replaces the browning ability you lose when you eliminate sugar. The EZsweet is liquid sucralose; Splenda is dry sucralose with some filler. To find the PolyD or EZsweet visit: Netrition.)
YUM. I may try to make these next weekend for the BENGALS PLAYOFF GAME. 😉
Andrew
Lucia,
Your recipe looks killer!
The only thing that could possibly make them better is to dip them in chocolate! I was at a great New Year’s Eve party and someone brought macaroons that had been chocolate dipped. They looked great but tasted even better! The same person served them along side of coconut dipped rum balls and the lightest cannoli I’ve ever eaten.
SteveE–
The guys are liking coconut macaroons enough that I’m going to test out several other recipes. Relative to the canned ones by Manischewitz these are lighter, drier and frailer. Both are very tasty. If you are wondering what I mean, look here:
http://www.amazon.com/Manischewitz-Coconut-Macaroons-10-Ounce-Tins/dp/B002XONCHY
Now, on the one hand, my guys prefer the drier to the gooier. But I like both, so I’m going to experiment. It might be that just a little more liquid would be useful– or wetting the coconut in the morning and letting it sit a hour or so.
But the current recipe is so easy, and they are tasty. (The high carb is easier than the low carb!)
Andrew_KY–
The unsweetened coconut is a little hard to find. So, call around. I found mine in the middle eastern food aisle.
There are lots of recipes using sweetened coconut, but obviously, you’d have to reduce the sugar to avoid having them be too sweet.
Since you say you don’t usually cook, I’ll explain the reason for pre-heating to a higher temperature. With cookies, what happens if the oven is not pre-heated is the air gets hot enough to make the read out say the oven is hot enough. BUT, depending on your exact oven design, the walls air outside the walls etc might not be fully hot. So, the element will keep turning on quite often. With most foods this doesn’t matter, but with cookies, the bottoms tend to cook faster than the top– especially if the cookie sheet is near the lower element. So if you make sure you preheat, and let the oven really, really get closer to “pseudo-equilibrium”, you are less likely to burn the bottom of the cookies before the tops cook.
(Mind you– you still need to watch– preferably through a window in the oven door!)
Interesting tips on the low-carb approach…. thanks!
Splenda is available in White and Brown. You can make a really good apple crisp with it
Now can we have a recipe which makes use of the spare egg yolks?
Long time lurker luker here. I made coconut macaroons this weekend with 3 egg whites, 150g caster sugar, 150g desiccated coconut, 1 tsp honey and half teaspoon vanilla extract. The recipe ( a new one to me) had the whole lot cooked up in a pan like porridge, until fairly dry, cooled, then formed into balls and baked at 300f for 10 – 15 mins – came out a bit brown – someone at the door, but taste ok, if a bit reminiscent of Klondike Pete’s Golden Nuggets!. With the egg yolks I made a cinnamon ice cream to go with an apple tart for New Years Eve dinner.
Ray
Yolks can be used up making Hollandaise! I think pudding. But Isabelle’s suggestion of ice cream sounds good too!
Re: lucia (Jan 3 07:01),
I’m not fond of either of AB’s hollandaise recipes. In the one you linked, he adds sugar(!) rather than lemon juice and salt to the egg yolks before cooking. Harold McGee in the classic reference book that AB often uses ‘On Food and Cooking’ says that acid helps to prevent protein coagulation, which is the major hazard in making hollandaise. You don’t make mayonnaise or Bearnaise without vinegar or Hollandaise without lemon juice. AB also doesn’t melt the butter first in either recipe. That means you have to keep heating the sauce as you add the butter. That’s a recipe for disaster unless you’re very good or very lucky. Not to mention that the viscosity of the sauce depends on how much water you add, and you add water when you add solid butter. I prefer Julia Child’s recipe in ‘From Julia Child’s Kitchen’, although I’ve stopped doing the lemon juice, water and white pepper reduction that she uses. It’s never failed for me when making Hollandaise for Eggs Benedict at New Years. A double boiler also makes it less likely the eggs will scramble or the sauce separate than direct heat, although it does take a little longer.
DeWitt,
Yikes! I didn’t even read the recipe. It was first, and I posted as an example. We just use the recipe in the Joy of Cooking which — correctly– uses lemon juice and no sugar.. We also use the double boiler.
Lucia et al –
Happy New Year to you all. I’ve enjoyed reading your recipeeing…
*
I’ve also just spotted that Roy has posted the December UAH anomaly, + 0.13. Good news for some lucky chancer but definitely not me!! 🙂
Anteros–
I just got back from dealing with an issue with AT&T and something the sold my father in law on 12/31/2012. (Everyone at AT&T was nice… but dang the sales man. Father in law is moving to assisted living, has terminal cancer, and a fuzzy memory. He signed up for Uverse to be installed 2 weeks after he moves into assisted living!!! Sigh….)
Off topic I know, but the December UAH figure has now been published at +0.127c
I love fresh coconut (right out of the shell), but loath processed coconut (shredded, dried, cooked, etc) because the processing breaks down some of the coconut oil into free fatty acids… including rather more volatile C8, C10, and C12 varieties, which are (for me at least) very unpleasant smelling. These ‘lighter’ fatty acids are almost completely absent from most other vegetable oils. In fresh coconut, they are ~100% bound up as triglycerides, which are non-volatile. So they only become smelly after processing.
Ray–
I just posted.
Sorry for the delay. First thing this morning, I had to go cancel a ATT Unverse subscription my father-in-law was talked into subscribing to. Installation was to be on Feb 3, 2012. The inlaws are moving to assisted living on Jan 17. He..uhmmm…. forgot. (This, among other things, is why we wanted him to move to assisted living. )
The people at AT&T were all very nice, but cancelling, confirming it was cancelled, and getting clarification on there being only 1 order not two took 3 hours. (This is partly because I had to do this from my inlaws phone which meant I had to drive there.)
The next dealy: Dreamhost had issues this morning. It wasn’t just my blog. My blog was iffy– and I couldn’t get in at Dreamhosts web interface either. I needed to get my IP permitted but they weren’t sending out emails.
At the same time, my blog specifically seemed to be experiencing an attack by a ‘bot net. I’m eventually going to explain that on the side blog. But…. really…. I’m sure zombie bots were hitting this morning. This may or may not be related to Dreamhost not sending out emails. (One of the reasons I was trying to get onto Dreamhost was because I could see that the bot net’s hitting, my blog was really slow and I wanted to restart. Some of you may not have noticed because Cloudflare was still delivering content in some parts of the world! It was weird looking at logs!)
SteveF–
Dried is definitely not as good as fresh! I was thinking of trying canned coconut. I can get that– is it any good? Or does the heat affect it just as much as drying?
As much as I enjoy fresh coconut, I’m not going to buy whole coconuts to make macaroons.
Lucia,
I expect the canning process (involving >100C temperature) accelerates the hydrolysis reaction a lot (maybe 2^7 times faster?), so the concentration of the volatile acids is probably higher than with drying. Although I have to admit I haven’t done a systematic taste sampling, since I can’t get the stuff past my lips! 🙂 I imagine that freshly grated coconut meat that was immediately frozen would be much better, since the hydrolysis process would be decelerated a lot at -30C. Of course, cooking the cookies would cause some hydrolysis as well…. so I don’t think I would ever like them; you could minimize hydrolysis by having the pH of the batter near neutral.
Maybe I would need litmus paper in the kitchen? I might try canned coconut meat partly to see if the cookies will be juicier inside. The ideal would be soft-most centers and crunchy outside. I’m not sure it can be done, but it’s worth trying canned coconut meat.
Lucia,
The pH is pretty near neutral for egg whites if they are reasonably fresh.
According to the Philippine Journal of Science (http://philjournalsci.dost.gov.ph/vol140no1/physico chemical and microbiological parameters.htm) the biggest factors for degradation of dry coconut to produce free fatty acids are moisture content (lower is better), and bacterial attack (uncontaminated is better). Moisture is (of course) needed for hydrolysis, so it makes sense that really low moisture in the “dry” coconut would yield lower lower levels of free fatty acids. Of course, the the drying process starts with plenty of water content in the coconut, so some degradation would seem inevitable, unless maybe you used low temperature drying (freeze drying?) to minimize the rate of degradation. But I don’t know if there are many people who find processed coconut as distasteful as I do, so there may be no market.
As a bench chemist from years ago I think DeWitt and SteveF have the chemistry right, but what I find fun with cooking is changing the recipes and attempting to make them better or at least better for the cook as the eater. I have heard that most recipes do not give the optimum results and I guess that is why I like what the American Test Kitchen attempts to do. Unfortunately one can go overboard in recipe changes or what might pass for a recipe that is stored in ones brain, but I have always held that I am no better than my latest (rendition of) Caesar salad.
In graduate school I was preparing new compounds with first row transition metals, thiocyanate and 1,10 ortho phenanthroline and under the directions of my graduate professor doing it in pyridine. I did it in a hood but still I smelt like pyridine when I left the lab. My professor insisted that the compounds would be too labile to be synthesized in water. As I recall when I tried the only one that was too labile was the metal Fe++ which was also the metal compound with cyanate that my professor was most familiar. The moral of the story is never be satisfied with the initial recipe.