Meringues on sticks, or homemade meringues, is a dish that has been familiar to many from early childhood. When girls grow up and become real housewives, they often encounter problems making good meringues at home. Indeed, to make such a dish at home, and without breaks, cracks, chips, magnificent and mouth-watering, you will have to make a lot of effort. And a couple of culinary tricks come in handy.
Russian Meringue
Today we will tell you how to make meringue on a stick at home and what tricky cookery tricks come in handy for this recipe. There may be several options for preparing meringues (French, Italian, Swedish, Swiss, etc.). In Switzerland, a water bath is used for cooking, in which sugar crystals already dissolved in proteins are whipped . In Italy, sugar syrup is used, which is cooked for a long time and according to a special recipe.
But Russian meringue on sticks is a meringue in French. Perhaps the easiest and easiest to prepare. But here there are some secrets that we will reveal a little later.
Ingredients
To make meringues, you only need protein and granulated sugar. But today we offer to cook bright and colorful meringues on a stick, a photo of which will already provoke the production of saliva. The taste will be even more pleasant in appearance, as we add vanilla sugar to enhance the aroma, and food and fruit additives for added palatability.
- Sugar - 250 grams.
- Proteins - four to five pieces (150 g).
- Fruit supplements in liquid form.
- Lemon juice (about three drops of lemon juice per protein).
- Food colors (color to choose from).
- Wooden skewers.
Glue for meringue
Meringue on a stick, the recipe of which we offer today, is supplemented with a special cream that will serve as the glue base between the wooden skewer and the meringue itself. You can fasten the meringues with each other by any means. To do this, use a cream for cakes, a base of condensed milk (as in our case), fruit or berry jam, etc.
- 35 grams of butter.
- 60 grams of boiled condensed milk.
By the way, the bonding base can not be cooked with meringues on sticks. In the recipe, even a cream that you recently used for a layer of cake or pastries can come in handy. Just during the preparation of the dessert, put a small amount of cream in an airtight container and place it in the refrigerator. The cream can thus maintain its โglueโ qualities for three to five days.
How to make a cream
The sticky meringue base on sticks is best prepared in advance if you donโt have a jar in the refrigerator, stored from past culinary experiments. Softened butter will need to be whipped with a mixer along with boiled condensed milk. The cream can be painted with oil or gel food coloring, or you can leave it, so to speak, in its original form. After whipping, remove the mass in the refrigerator until the right time.
How to cook meringue on a stick: recipe with photo
The first and perhaps most important rule for making meringues is the correct temperature of the proteins. Never use egg white as soon as you take it out of the refrigerator or bring it from the store. Let the eggs stand for a while and assume room temperature. Warming up proteins or eggs is not recommended.
In some formulations, there is a point where the exact temperature of the proteins is indicated. For example, fourteen degrees. But not every housewife has the ability to measure this temperature. Experienced culinary experts say that no special measurements are required. Fifteen to twenty minutes will be enough for the eggs to lie on a plate on a table in the kitchen, and they are ready for further work.
The dishes in which you will beat the squirrels must always be dry and clean. Start whipping at a slow speed. The mixer is recommended to set the average speed only after two or three minutes of beating at minimum. In a couple of minutes it will already be noticeable that the proteins began to acquire a snow-white bright color and turn into a strong glossy foam.
Add sugar
Sugar should be sprinkled in a thin stream only after the whites have whipped for five minutes. So that sugar does not stick to the walls of the container, direct a stream of sand onto the mixer blades. With this technique, no lumps will form in the process. After the whole portion of sugar has been added to the proteins, you can saturate the future meringues with aromas. Add vanilla sugar, aromatic fruit additives or regular vanillin. Also slowly and gradually.
An important point. The peak generated by whipping proteins should not be constant. Experienced chefs advise to achieve such a consistency of protein mass when a peak is formed, but quickly falls off. This is precisely such meringue that will be real, persistent and will never crack in the baking process.
How to choose a dye
If you decide to make bright meringues on a stick, then you will need food coloring to work. Experts advise to give preference to dry coloring substances. Liquid gel dyes may lose color saturation due to temperature in the oven. Dry ones, on the contrary, only become brighter. In addition, dry dye does not affect the consistency of protein mass.
Meringue baking process
On a large baking sheet, parchment paper or foil must be spread in advance. The temperature of the oven is from one hundred to one hundred and ten degrees. We lay out the prepared protein mass in a bag or a special pastry bag with a nozzle of any shape. Squeeze out the desired portion on a baking sheet. Bake meringues for an hour.
After the meringue is slightly browned, it is ready. We take out a baking sheet, spread the meringue on a flat plate and give it a little rest and cool.
It remains only to fix the sticks. To do this, take one meringue and grease it with cream. Next, put the stick and close the second meringue. It turns out a kind of pie, where we serve as a wooden skewer filling. We give the dessert time for the cream "glue" to seize and freeze. Now, the meringues on sticks can be laid out in a beautiful ring on a festive dish and served.