Small, yes. Cute, maybe. But dainty … well, anyone who has seen me consuming a beer and cheese fries has witnessed my manic greasy-fingered rampage. And this isn’t even counting the ensuing gaseous aftershock.
But when I stroll into Chantal Guillon in Hayes Valley, even I stand up straight and wipe my grubby paws on my jeans. The tiny macaron-and-tea shop is bright and enchanting, and on display behind clean glass are dozens upon dozens of colorful, perfectly round French treats, bright raised polka dots in neat rows. They’re simple, but gorgeous: two tiny flat cookies, sandwiching a ganache filling.
Chantal is behind the counter when I visit. A stately woman who is as quintessentially Parisian as her cookies, Chantal is always dressed to the nines — perhaps with a silk scarf around her neck, or maybe with patent leather heels. Her ice-blue eyes mean business when she delicately plucks a macaron — the rose flavor – from the case. Now this is a woman who knows how to dainty it up.
I can’t wait to get a cookie IN MAH BELLEH, but when Chantal places one in my hand, I am struck by its delicacy and beauty. And so, with Chantal watching me with her friggin’ classy stare, I very gently take a tiny nibble.
Whoa. Tiny nibble … huge taste. Floral, sweet, incredible – the rose-flavored macaron tastes so much like a fragrance that frankly I can’t figure out which of my senses I’m using. The texture is secondary, but equally brilliant: The exquisitely thin, crisp crust gives way to an incredibly soft, chewy interior and a rich, creamy center.
I keep nibbling at the macaron to savor it as long as I can, and I gotta admit — for such a small cookie, I feel way more satiated having eaten it in minuscule, flavor-packed bites than just nomming it in one. But … good god, I still want another. And another and another and so I ask Chantal if I can take a glimpse into her macaron factory, and she agrees.
When I first arrive at the address in SOMA that Chantal gives me, I’m not sure I’m at the right place. It would appear that I’m at an ice cream factory. I mean, not the biggest disappointment, but …
That’s when Alexandra shows up. She’s Chantal’s daughter and is the co-owner of
Bacetti
, which makes tiny, deliciously smooth bricks of chocolate-covered gelato and shares a kitchen with Chantal’s operation. She ushers me in and gives me some tasty ice cream treats with pine-nut filling to munch on while we wait for her mom. Soon, Chantal walks in. She smiles a lot and is silent. At first, I take her reserved nature for fancy aloofness, but she explains that her English is shaky. Chantal moved to San Francisco from France in 2008 with nary an English word in her vocabulary.
As we walk into the factory kitchen, I’m expecting to find a ginormous operation that smells of baking cookies. But instead, Chantal’s kitchen is two tiny rooms, one teensy oven, and pastry chef Erin Emmett. And, surprisingly, macaron dough doesn’t smell like much. Today Erin’s making an apricot version, and the dough is a gooey pink. Chantal says that it’s actually meringue — egg whites and almond powder, whisked together in a perfect formula.
Erin pipes out tiny dollops of the meringue onto high-tech silicone baking sheets. But since the kitchen makes up to 2,000 cookies a day, she’s helped by a big machine that also squirts dollops onto the sheets. “They’re absolutely nonstick,” Erin explains, “which lets the cookies bake more evenly. We want them to be delicate.”
Even for the professionals, it’s challenging. “In the beginning, we’d have the cookie be too soft or too chewy. Macarons are very chemical and very sensitive to their environment. Even weather and humidity can affect them,” Chantal explains. “If the oven is not balanced, it can make a bad batch. If you use too much sugar, it will be brittle and break. If you use too much [almond] powder, it will be too dry. It’s also difficult to make fruit flavors because of the humidity of the juice, which can conflict with the crust.”
The recipe that finally worked was a break from tradition: an Italian meringue instead of French, with white chocolate ganache instead of buttercream filling. Of course, since each cookie is infused with simple but vivid flavoring, Chantal uses the best ingredients she can.
Chantal sources her ingredients locally and organically as often as possible, including her almond powder.
she affirms. She also uses fancy Mariage Frères tea leaves for her explosively earthy jasmine green tea flavor, and real fruit for her bright and tart strawberry and passionfruit flavors. Her espresso macarons are chocolaty and not bitter in the slightest, and her vanilla version is so full of flecks of vanilla beans and smooth ganache that it is an eerily accurate rendering of solid vanilla ice cream. Even her butter is of the finest quality she can find.
After the cookies are pulled out of the oven, they vary slightly in size, so an assistant meticulously finds matching pairs for each cookie, ensuring that every finished macaron looks balanced. Erin pours caramel, apricot ganache, and other fillings into pastry bags, pipes them onto one of the cookies, and gently presses its partner on top. Finally, she adds delicate finishing touches –on today’s apricot macarons, she adds a tiny dot of gold paint to the top of each. And voilà!
I find myself in front of a finished batch of beautiful pastel-pink macarons. Chantal offers one to me and takes one herself. We bite into them, and the crust cracks open and crumbles. It’s a little too chewy. Unlike most cookies, macarons aren’t best out of the oven, but reach their peak after a day or so, when they make it into the store. Still – the taste is phenomenal.
Too soon, our interview is done, and I am being ushered toward the door. I shake hands and say goodbyes, and only after I am standing outside and unlocking my bike do I realize that something is amiss. I stood in the macaron factory, surrounded by cookies, and had only that one apricot macaron. Only one. No doubt – I am not satiated.
A couple of days later, I walk into Chantal Guillon’s store once again, and this time, I get an entire box with all 12 flavors in it – espresso, Tahitian vanilla, salted caramel, strawberry, pistachio, passionfruit, lavender with blackcurrant filling, rose, hazelnut, jasmine green tea, dark chocolate, and apricot. Chantal hints that in a couple of months, she will swap out some of these for fall flavors like pumpkin, grapefruit, chestnut, and Earl Grey, but for now, I’m totally happy with my loot. I get a cup of Mariage Frères green tea to go along with my macarons, and practically run down the block to my house, eager to open my white cardboard tube, filled with sweet cookies nestled side by side.
And yes. I eat them pinky up, mindfully, with as much grace as I can muster.
Oh, well. Baby steps.
You can visit Chantal Guillon in Hayes Valley. My fave flavors are the lavender,
vanilla, rose, and green tea, but you should find your own!
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TwoCats
I'm just starting. I've aged my whites and my macarons look just like the photos with little feet and smooth tops. I have one problem that I can't figure out. When you bite into the macaron, the top cracks. I went to a local bakery that only bakes macarons. When you bite into their cookies the top doesn't crack. Do you have any advice?
My daughter-in-law wants me to make these for her baby shower.
Run Your Mouth