Passionfruit Butter

This post marks part two of my dissertation on the tasting Sucré hosted at its mid-city kitchen last Friday. Click here for Part I: The Entremets.

Sucré’s macaroons have received their due share of fame, what with attention from Paula Deen, Oprah, and Su-Jit Lin alike. It’s difficult to pay adequate tribute to what it means to actually eat one, though. Words can only go so far to describe their brilliance and manifold flavor. But I’ll try.

Otherworldly ooze... or just pistachio macaroon cookies before being popped in the oven.

These little cookies are the quintessence of what the Parisians must have been going for with the macaron. It’s something of a textural odyssey, all packed into a space smaller than a ring box. Allow me to walk you through it.

The first challenge is choosing exactly which macaroon to eat. With a selection of chocolate, hazelnut, almond, pistachio, orange, lemon, strawberry, and pecan, it can be kind of difficult to choose. They’re the Fabergé eggs of the cookie world, colored as though they’d been crafted by a painter rather than a pastry chef, dotted with Sucré’s trademark glitter or garnished with itty-bitty nibs of cacao or toasted nuts. The hues are potent in a way that invites you to touch and taste.

The concept itself is nothing new to us: if we’re just talking about soft cream sandwiched between crispy cookies, we might as well grab a box of Oreos. What makes these special is the knowledge as you eat them that they were masterfully made. The cookies themselves are not simply crispy but rather a multitude of different consistencies in rapid succession; in fact, the crispiness is but a fleeting presence as you bite into the cookie, whose outer layer (it’s puffed-out and hollow) then shatters into ethereal shards, falling in on itself to reveal the substance behind the flawless and charming exterior.

Once your teeth have made that preliminary break through the diaphanous veil of crunch, you encounter the dense, dark, luscious inside, an artfully executed mess of the cookie’s remains, which lose their integrity to the mousseline. You are left with a chewy-gooey-sticky (in that order) implosion, a lot like cake or brownie batter. So you see, it’s a complex microcosm of taste and texture. You COULD try this at home, but I’m not sure how easily anyone could emulate it. Tariq Hanna shrugged off my likening of him to Willy Wonka, but the parallel of the chef to the famed whimsical chocolatier is unmistakable… at least when you’re eating his macaroons.

Hazelnut macaroon: delicate cookie melds with rich hazelnut mousseline