Paper

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together”
– Vincent van Gogh.

As for art so for macarons. Making them is all about getting a whole series of little things right: weighing, measuring, timing, temperature control, humidity control, batter consistency and on and on. It’s a multistage process – do each stage consistently and the results are great, deviate in anyone and it all falls apart.

Given this how much possible difference can baking paper make? Actually, as it turns out, a lot.

We’ve been looking for a new paper supplier for a while as the brand we had been using didn’t release as well as we wanted and it was irritating. After much sourcing and testing of samples we found a new supplier, Blechrein, based in Germany.

It seems ludicrous that we cannot source an equivalent price/quality product in the UK but that is sadly the case. However, their paper is amazing; tray after tray after tray of perfect macarons that release with hardly any effort. It has transformed the process; not a single cracked shell (we’d always get one or two in a batch of 360 but not any longer) and as a completely unforeseen bonus filling them now takes half the time it did.

Our paper joy is now unbounded, but the real lesson I suppose is that there are always improvements one can make, and no matter how small they may appear in the first instance you should make them; the results may surprise you.