It is believed that making meringue cookies at home is quite difficult. This is a misconception, the recipe for making meringues is simple, but requires attention to detail. Below we describe them in more detail.
The recipe for meringue.
Ingredients:
- 4 fresh chicken eggs. In order to bake meringue cookies, we need only squirrels.
- 200-300 grams of sugar.
Cooking:
Squirrels are carefully separated from the yolks, placed in a convenient bowl. Beat them with a mixer in thick foam until the so-called “peak state”. Peaks are steadily standing “traces” from mixer knives pulled out from the whipped mass.
We begin to pour sugar. We do this carefully, without turning off the mixer. Sugar is added in two to three doses.
The whipped whites with sugar should become more elastic. Their readiness is checked by turning the bowls, the “correct” mass does not follow.
The baking sheet is covered with baking paper. If not, you can use plain white office paper.
Whipped foam is spread on paper with a cooking syringe. Servings should be small in size commensurate with the volume of foam placed in a teaspoon (with a slide, of course). By the way, if there is no syringe on the farm, proteins can be laid out with the same teaspoon. In this case, there will be no decorative stripes on the finished cookie.
Place the baking sheet in the oven, heated to 100 - 130 degrees, and leave the meringue to dry. The process will take about one and a half hours (plus or minus), the temperature is 100 -110 ° C throughout its entire length.
We leave the finished meringues to cool in the oven. After cooling, carefully remove from paper.
The subtleties of making meringues.
They can be divided into two groups.
The first is associated with obtaining high-quality protein mass, whipped into a "cool" foam. What is recommended:
Eggs must be chilled.
When separating proteins, it is necessary to ensure that they do not get a drop of yolk.
The whisk bowl should be clean and dry. No fat or water.
Sugar can be added after an initially stable foam is obtained, giving peaks, as already mentioned. The total whipping time is not more than 10 minutes.
Some people think it’s better to use powdered sugar for meringues. Perhaps, but this does not affect the final result.
The second group is related to the drying process.
The baking temperature should not be high.
During the preparation of meringues, the temperature in the oven should not change dramatically. Therefore, you should not open the oven almost until the very end of drying, that is, until the moment when you need to check the degree of readiness of the cookies.
It is important to prevent the meringues from sticking. This can happen at a higher temperature or if the cookies are “overexposed” in time.
The meringues should cool in the oven (along with the oven).
That's all. As you can see, the recipe for making meringues is simple.
Next, we will briefly consider how to bake meringues in an unusual format.
A few simple ways to diversify your meringue recipe.
The taste of cookies can be slightly changed by adding a little vanilla sugar to the proteins. The result is a meringue with a light vanilla flavor.
The second way is to add nuts to the liver. For this, small pieces of nuts are laid out on a baking sheet, and the protein mass is laid on top of each of them. After drying, inside each cookie will be a piece of walnut.
Nuts can be any, the most refined is the combination of meringues and almonds.
The third way is to make marble meringues. To do this, melt and cool the 100 gram bar of dark chocolate. Then, emphasize, chilled chocolate is carefully poured into the protein foam and lightly mixed. We do not strive for uniformity of the mixture. The resulting mass should look like poorly mixed, contain dark and white stripes. Also, ready-made marble (hence the name) meringue cookies will also look.