Category Archives: how to

What makes meringues chewy?

piped meringue stars

Meringues are one of the simplest things to bake, with just two ingredients. But because of this simplicity, there isn’t much room for error. As with many baked goods that are difficult to get right, there is also a wide range of views on what the ideal meringue is like. Some want a completely crisp shell that shatters on the touch of a fork – ideal for something like Eton Mess where the meringue is smashed into pieces.

Others are looking for a chewy centre, almost like nougat. This is often the ideal state of a pavlova base. Finally, there’s the type of soft pillowy meringue used to top a lemon meringue pie.

Chewy almond meringue

All these are meringues that use egg whites and sugar – so what’s the X factor?

What is a meringue?

A meringue is an egg white foam that is made more stable by adding sugar. The sugar syrup supports the bubbles, and holds them up while they dry, leaving behind the sugar and egg-white-protein structure. Egg whites are pretty amazing at creating a foam anyway, owing to all these stretchy proteins they have. However, if you keep beating egg whites on their own, they will go too far – first becoming grainy and then collapsing on themselves.

Tips for making meringues:

  • Adding sugar to the eggs right at the start will make it slower to foam in the first place, so wait until you have a foam.

egg whites - soft foam

  • However, unlike egg whites on their own, it’s really hard to overbeat meringue, so if in doubt, add it early on, when the foam is still quite soft (a lot of recipes ask you to wait until you have stiff peaks before adding the sugar, but this isn’t necessary, especially if you’re using an electric whisk or a stand mixer). After the sugar is all added, you can also leave it whisking for a good few minutes to make sure you have a really stiff foam.
  • The more sugar you add the more stable the foam – you can use anything from 1:1 sugar to egg white (by weight) to 2:1, with the upper end being more common. For a 2:1 ratio, weigh your egg whites out, and then add twice the weight of sugar.
  • The sugar needs to dissolve, so use caster (superfine) sugar or icing sugar, and add it gradually. Warm or room temperature egg whites will make it easier to dissolve. Yotam Ottolenghi has a nice trick for his salted almond meringues – heating the sugar in the oven, then adding it gradually.
  • A little bit of acid helps egg whites to foam – you can wipe the bowl with a lemon, add a little cream of tartar or a few drops of vinegar.

And one more thing? Because egg whites are pretty much just protein and water, there isn’t much in them to go off. This means that you can keep egg whites quite safely for several weeks in the fridge. Or they freeze well (but never defrost in the microwave – they cook too quickly!).

For a crisp meringue

Here, we are after a meringue with all of the moisture removed so all that is left is the brittle egg white and sugar structure. To do this, use a ratio of 2 parts sugar (by weight) to 1 part egg white. As a large egg white is about 28g, that means about 110g (4oz) sugar for two large egg whites (or 100g for medium whites).

You also then need a very low temperature and a long time to make sure that all the water evaporates without browning the sugar. Something around 100°C/212°F is about right. When you have finished baking, leave the meringues in the turned off oven to cool, and remove any last moisture.

salted almond meringues to be baked

For a chewy meringue

If a meringue is chewy in the centre, it just means that it managed to hang on to some of the moisture in the foam. You still want a hard shell, so use 2 parts sugar again, or something close to it. You can add things to the mixture to help it hang on to this moisture – a little bit of cornflour being used most often. Chopped or ground nuts, as in french macarons or dacquoise, will also do this, partly by adding a bit of fat.

The other thing that will help make a chewy meringue is to bake them a little hotter and for a shorter time, meaning the centre doesn’t have the chance to dry out. Be careful of baking too hot though – this will cause the meringues to swell, and may overbrown the outside. A temperature of about 130°C/265°F is good.

For a pie meringue

Meringue-topped pies can be difficult. It can be particularly tricky to make sure it sits nicely on top of the topping, and to avoid moisture from the filling moving into the meringue, and making it ‘weep’. But in principle, it’s like the chewy meringue, but more extreme – it needs even more moisture in it, needs to stay stable, and you want the outside to cook very quickly and brown, before the inside dries at all. So add cornflour to stabilise it, and bake in a much hotter oven – around 170°C/340°F – to get a nice crisp top. Felicity Cloake’s Perfect Lemon Meringue Pie is a good guide.

Meringue recipes

I’ve made a couple of really good meringue recipes recently. Via pinterest, and this blog post by Jillian Leiboff, Yotam Ottolenghi’s salted almond meringues are really lovely – crisp outsides, chewy in the middle, and scented with both toasted almonds and almond extract.

This one, however, is an old favourite – adapted from a recipe in Flo Braker’s ‘Sweet Miniatures’. These are gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate cookies – little drops of meringue flecked with chopped chocolate.

Chocolate Meringue Stars

adapted from Flo Braker’s ‘Sweet Miniatures’

Chocolate meringue bubbles

– 100g caster sugar
– 2 large egg whites (55g)
– 45g dark chocolate

Line a baking sheet with parchment. Heat the oven to 110°C/100°C fan/225°F.

Grate or finely chop the chocolate, or grind it in a food processor until fairly fine.

Whisk the egg whites with an electric hand whisk or the whisk attachment of a stand mixer. Whisk slowly to start, as the protein unravels and the egg whites loosen up. Then increase the speed and whisk until a soft foam forms. Add the sugar a few spoonfuls at a time, whisking thoroughly between each, and then keep whisking for about three minutes until you have a very stiff and shiny foam.

stiff, shiny meringue

Remove the whisk and fold in the chopped chocolate until it is fairly evenly distributed.

folding in the chocolate

Use your finger to put a little meringue on the four corners of the parchment, and turn over to stick the parchment to the baking sheet (this stops it moving around when you pipe onto it).

Scrape the mixture into a piping bag with either a plain or star-tipped nozzle. If you don’t want to pipe them, simply use teaspoons to drop pieces of meringue about the size of a golf ball onto the baking sheet.

Bake for 1 hour. The finely chopped chocolate, combined with a short bake time means the centres should be chewy and chocolatey.

chocolate meringue stars

Further reading:

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Stock that’s clear

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It’s very seldom that you achieve the platonic ideal of stock. There is an idea of a clear, golden liquid that conveys many layered savoury depths, and brings a touch of magic wherever you use it,

Reams of cookery writers have written hymns to the power of stock. Anyone trained in the traditions of French cooking, from Joel Robuchon to Michael Ruhlman, will have learnt all about stock as the absolute foundation of French cuisine, the essential component of all meat cookery at least. But even home cooks like Nigella Lawson are converts to this idea.

I fall somewhere in between. I hate food waste, so the idea of extracting every last drop of flavour and nourishment from a chicken carcass really appeals to me. I follow Nigella’s suggestion of freezing chicken bones, and when I have two or three chickens worth, I put them all in a large pot of cold water, bring it to the boil, simmer for about an hour and a half, then add chopped onions, carrots, a stick or two of celery, a few peppercorns and bits of thyme and parsley if I have them around, and simmer for a further hour.

What this produces is fairly flavourful and good for soups and risottos. But it’s not what you think of as beautiful stock – the clear, golden liquid you might see in a consomme or tortellini in brodo.

I know that you should keep stock bubbling very slowly, but the importance of how slow this should be didn’t really sink in until I made ham stock for Heston’s pea and ham soup, using the recipe in Heston Blumenthal at Home. The recipe suggests that you cover the ham with water, add onions, carrots and leeks, bring to a simmer, then place in an 85C oven for 5 hours. This very slow, long cooking produces a liquid that stays well below boiling for the entire duration but still extracts deep flavours.

IMG_3783

When I took the ham out of the oven after this 5 hour stint, the liquid was so clear I could see all the way to the bottom of the pot. It helped that, to ensure the gammon wasn’t too salty, I had brought it to the boil, poured the water away, and then cover it with fresh water to make the stock. This helped remove the scum and bits of floating protein that will always accumulate when you boil raw meat.

A few days later, I rescued the bones from two especially fat pheasants we ate pot-roasted for New Year’s Eve from the freezer, and made stock from them. After the ham experience, I took the lid off, and after bringing it to the boil, kept the heat as low as possible. You can see the cooking in the (rather noisy) video below. It was barely possible to see a single bubble over the course of a minute. The reward for this was a beautiful, clear golden stock. I think this calls for a risotto.

Using stock

To really show off your stock, make risotto – this really captures the flavour you’ve painstakingly brought in. It also makes great soups (although water will almost always do, especially for vegetable soups), provides liquid for curries, gravy, bolognese sauces. If you’re going to make stock regularly (and if you eat roast chicken, it’s not difficult), don’t be precious about it. Use it whenever you see the opportunity. It’s silly to wait for a perfect risotto to use your stock, when you could use it to improve things, even just a little, throughout the week.

Making good stock

  • You don’t need the very best ingredients, but neither should you use only compost materials. Make sure the vegetables are clean, and that most of the skin and fat have been removed from the bones.
  • Stock is all about long and slow. Doing this in the oven is easier, but requires you to have an ovenproof pot with a lid big enough to make this work. Chicken bones want at least two hours, preferably three.
  • Either keep the vegetables in large pieces, and add them at the start, or chop them into chunks and add to the pot with an hour to go.
  • Strain through a fine sieve, or layer of damp cheesecloth to remove any particles. This also means you can add herbs and peppercorns straight to the pot without tieing them into a bundle.
  • Don’t season your stock. You might want to reduce it, so only add salt when you use the stock, not when you make it.
  • Reducing the stock will concentrate the flavour and make it easier to store. After you have strained it, pour back into a clean pot and boil fast to drive off water.
  • Stock freezes really well – it’s the best way to store it. Use either strong freezer bags, or rigid takeaway soup containers. With freezer bags, you can easily get small holes once the bag is frozen, so be sure to defrost it in a container, in case the bag leaks.

Ask Nigel (the science bit)

One of the pleasures of the Sunday papers for me us Nigel Slater’s column in the Observer. The Internet allows me to create my own personal ‘best of’ Sunday paper, and not to have to get out of bed to read it (provided my laptop is in reach).

One of the things that they have added in the past year is a questions and answers section, where Nigel kindly answers reader’s queries. While I find his answers interesting, they are not sufficiently scientific for my liking, so I thought I would have a go and providing some alternative answers to the same questions. Here are Nigel’s original answers.

Q Nigel, for flavour and nutrition, is it better to crush or chop cloves of garlic? Many thanks.
For flavour, the more you disrupt the garlic cells, the more of their flavour you release. So for a subtle flavour, slice it thinly, for more oomph, chop finely (my personal choice) and for maximum flavour, or where you need something smooth (e.g. to add to mayonnaise for aioli) crush it with salt using the side of a knife. For nutritional purposes, unless you’re using bulbs and bulbs, whatever you do with the garlic is unlikely to affect the nutrition of the dish one way or another.

Q Is there a way to stop yogurt curdling and turning grainy when added to curry?
Yoghurt will curdle because the milk proteins denature – yoghurt is high in protein, and when heated too much, the protein molecules tangle with each other and form lumpy curds. This doesn’t happen with cream, because there is too much fat in the way, so using a full-fat or greek yoghurt will help. You can also stabilise the yoghurt by adding something else to interfere with coagulation – starch. Mixing a little yoghurt with some cornflour (say 1 tsp for a 4 person curry) will thicken the yoghurt slightly and provide stability. Finally, make sure you add the yoghurt at the end. Cook the curry all the way, turn off the heat and just stir through the yoghurt. It’s getting the yoghurt too hot that causes the curdling in the first place.

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