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Am I part of one of the last generations that cooks depending on cookbooks instead of web searches? In our house, we a have a set of cookbooks that is the basis of everything we make, so much so, that last year I went to Powells Books in Portland and bought new copies of all our old cookbooks to replace the food-spattered, broken-spined versions we had!
Anyway, after making Alton Brown's Aged Egg Nog (from his website, negating everything I just wrote above, I guess), I had a bunch of egg whites I didn't want to throw away. A half batch of egg nog uses *six* egg yolks! I did not want to make an angel food cake, which feels like one standard egg white 'sink', or meringue cookies--these only because my family doesn't like them, which is a bummer. I still wanted to use the egg whites. So as not to be waste, they needed to be "purposed".
I figured out I could make coconut macaroons with them. I looked up recipes, including one in the Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen cookbook, which had maximum egg whites, so that was a winner, and another one in The Field Guide to Cookies (my favorite cookie cookbook). The Good Housekeeping recipe had you mix up the
ingredients, then cook at a lower (325F) temp for a longer time (25 min). The Field Guide to cookies had a recipe with an extra step of drying out the cookie "dough" (really, sugar, egg whites and flaked coconut) by stirring over a boiling water bath for 20 minutes, and then you cooked at a higher temp than Good
Housekeeping--regular cookie 350F--for a shorter time. The extra step was designed to dry out the mix so it would hold its shape better. I felt like that was probably smart, but I figured, hey, the Test Kitchen one probably is fine.
Well, you learn things by doing, or not doing, and I should have done the extra work, which is why my macaroons all look like hats with brims on them, since the excess liquid pooled off before the cookies set in the oven.
Tonight I am going to put tempered chocolate on them. I've never tried to temper chocolate, but I'm going to try a recipe in my new version (I bought the new AND the old same version that we had in the house already) that has a cheat mode using a sous vide machine.