This season on MasterChef the contestants have gone meringue crazy — pavlovas, loose piped jewels of white fluff, crisp little bites or sticks of the white crispy stuff adding sweetness and crunch to desserts, and even occasionally savoury dishes.
Here’s my guide to this beloved treat.
The four enemies of good meringue
- Alien matter in your whites
Unwanted fat or a little bit of egg yolk may stop your egg whites whipping properly so be careful when separating your eggs.
Also make sure you use clean utensils and a clean bowl. They should be well-dried too. Fat is harder to remove from plastic bowls through washing so it’s a wise precaution to whip egg whites in metal or ceramic bowls rather than plastic.
Wiping your bowls with vinegar is another precaution you can take against unwanted alien incursions. - The sugar
Two major issues can occur with the incorporation of the sugar. If you add it too quickly to the eggs, or don’t beat the sugar into the egg whites for long enough, then the meringues can be grainy.
Check by rubbing the meringue between your fingers to check there is no graininess. Also add your sugar little by little as this will help it incorporate. You are looking for a glossy stable foam once the sugar is incorporated in which the beaters leave a ribbony trail. A warning — if you add your sugar too slowly the mix will get too fluffy and the texture of the meringues will be too open. - Overwhipping
Over whip the egg whites and you risk making them too firm and they will risk losing the moisture that they hold. This will affect your meringue’s crispness, as well as making it more likely to collapse or weep beads of sugar.
As my meringue guru Gary Mehigan advises: “If you over whip the egg whites you cannot fix it. You’ve just got to start over.” So start whisking on a medium speed to get soft peaks and then speed up the mixer when the sugar is added.
A soft peak is one that peaks but then the tip of that peak softly collapses on itself.
Also remember that cold egg whites will incorporate less air when you whip, so room temperature eggs are best. - Moisture
Moisture is the deadly enemy of meringues. When there is lots of moisture in the air, whether from humidity, or even from other cooking that you are doing in the kitchen, you’ll have problems.
You’ll find moisture can draw the sugar out of the meringue leaving a sticky residue and making it look like the meringue is crying sweet sugar tears. Also, the secret to a good crisp meringue is in the drying of the meringue after cooking. There is also an old wives’ tale that older eggwhites will make a tighter, more stable, meringue which may well be because they have lost some moisture.
In fact some old kitchens used to separate egg whites a day before making the eggs as their moisture content will then reduce through evaporation.
Also remember to leave the meringues in the cooling oven to fully dry out after they have finished cooking — unless you want a delicious chew to their centres. Oh, don’t forget to turn the oven off when you do this.
Stability
There is a school of thought that believes the egg whites need something to stabilise them; whether a pinch of salt, a little acidity from vinegar or cream of tartar, or even from the impact of being whisked in a copper bowl. (Another wives’ tale is that copper oxide from the bowl adds stabilisation).
The four meringues
Meringues have three main types — four if you count pavlova as a separate type of meringue.
- French meringue is the most common and simplest method. It’s as simple as whisking 100g of caster sugar in two egg whites beaten to soft peaks and then cooking spoonfuls in a slow (120C) oven for 90 minutes. This meringue is perfect for that lovely old French dessert of “snow eggs” where the balls of raw meringue are poached in a loose custard.
- Italian meringue is different in that a boiling sugar syrup (at about 120C) is whisked into the egg white for a softer more stable result that is perfect for piping, topping lemon meringue pie, serving raw or blow-torching after piping on to ice cream for a cheat’s baked Alaska.
- Swiss meringue is the rarest with the egg whites whipped in a bowl over hot water so they warm and then whipped with the sugar until they cool. This results in a meringue with a good marshmallowy centre when baked. No, I’ve never made it either!
- Australian meringue has one use only — pavlova. There are two distinct schools of thought here but suffice to say I’d rather use vinegar than the more common corn starch to stabilise the meringue.
Having said that I do have to admit that I find the flouriness of the cornstarch noticeable and I’m not a fan of a huge, fat marshmallowy pavlova — although the vinegar will still give the pavlova some of this if you want it without adding the cornstarch.
I like my pav slightly collapsed, chewy of centre and crisp of surface. For this reason I never let it dry out in the cooling oven for the officially prescribed six (!) hours.
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Information in this article is correct as of 3 June, 2014.
Matt Preston writes for the taste section, available every Tuesday in The Courier Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and Herald Sun, every Wednesday in The Advertiser and in Perth’s Sunday Times.
