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April 17, 2006
The Meringue Project
It's been whole days since I wrote a cooking post, so here's the meringue story. Encouraged by my whipped-cream success, I decided to make meringues for Francis' birthday party. Meringues with hand-whipped egg whites, no less. Yes, I realize that I'm somewhat of a holdout with my whisk and sore elbow, and an electric mixer can probably be bought for next to nothing at the corner deli. I just can't stand to buy another kitchen item at this point, when there's a gorgeous new pasta maker (a Christmas present -- thanks Jo!) that I haven't used yet, and I haven't gotten rid of my four non-whistling teapots (what do you do with those? I would feel terrible about giving them to Goodwill -- what if someone's house burns down? They're perfectly good otherwise. Anyone know a whistle mechanic?).
So I skimmed over the recipe and saved some eggs and eventually got around to separating them a couple of hours before the party. Then I whisked. And whisked. There is much more whisking involved than with cream. It's a slow process, and at the beginning it looks extremely unlikely that the bubbly clear goo will ever turn into anything fluffy and white. When your arm is about to start shaking, though, it starts to firm up, and if you keep going you eventually get those fabled "stiff peaks". Amazing.
Once I had the egg whites whipped, I checked to see what other ingredients I might need (I do not recommend this sequence of activities). The recipe called for "superfine" sugar. My sugar box says nothing about being superfine. It's just brand-name white sugar. I thought for a minute that "superfine" might just be an extra marketing thing, like "extra fancy." Not likely. I had confectioner's sugar, so I thought about using that, but the recipe that uses that in Joy is the "alternative" recipe, and it calls for half superfine sugar and half confectioner's. This being my virgin experience with meringues, I wasn't going for anything "alternative," so I carefully incorporated my sugar and vanilla and cream of tartar (or maybe that was there from the beginning) and hoped everything would be okay.
Next, I got out three cookie sheets and started making little mounds (these were going to be mini meringues) with a spoon. Not satisfied with their looks, I switched to squeezing the fluff out of a corner of a zip lock back. Then, still not satisfied that I was being creative enough, I dyed the rest of the batch purple (festive, no?).
It's been a week since this happened, so I'm not sure how I did this, but when it was time to put the meringues in, the oven was too hot. Joy talks about how "cooking" meringues really only involves drying them out sufficiently to make the outsides crunchy, so you cook them on really low heat. For some reason (probably because I didn't check the heat in the recipe until later and over-pre-heated it), I had the oven set for higher than it should be (can you sense impending doom?). I left the door open for a while to let it cool down, and then put the meringues in for their allotted 2 hours.
One hour into this experiment, I turned on the oven light and saw two sad things:
1. Non-superfine size sugar crystals were popping up like chicken pox on my meringues.
2. The meringues were all brown. No purple or white in sight.
In other words, they looking NOTHING like the bright white mounds of sugar my mother made when I was little. Not light, not white, and certainly not fluffy. The sugar must have caramelized a little in the heat. When we finally got them out of the oven, I broke about a third of them just trying to unstick them from the pan.
The best of the batch were still brought to the party, where brave (drunk) souls took cautious bites. I stuck to Derek's white bean dip (blend white beans and pesto sauce and, poof!, better party food than mine). Sigh.
Posted by csageday at April 17, 2006 11:43 PM
Comments
Derek, please post the recipe for your white bean dip, sounds delicious!
Posted by: Mom at April 23, 2006 12:22 PM