Secrets to Gluten-Free Macaroons

With many more people developing gluten sensitivities and celiac disease, I’m always looking out for great recipes like this one for gluten-free macaroons. This recipe for tasty almond-pine nut macaroons came from a special holiday baking book supplement that Yankee put out in the 1990s. I made a few modifications for more reliable results, but they’re very simple and easy. You just need a little bit of patience to let the cookies sit for 30 minutes before baking. Do that, and you’ll have great results. Enjoy!

Almond-Pine Nut Gluten-Free Macaroons

Ingredients:

• 1 8-ounce can almond paste
• ⅔ cup sugar
• 2 egg whites
• ⅛ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon almond extract
• ½ cup pine nuts

Method:

Preheat oven to 325°F.  Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.

Crumble the almond paste into the bowl of a standing mixture. Add the sugar and beat until the mixture is  very crumbly, about 1 minute.  In another bowl, hand-beat the egg whites with the salt until they are foamy all the way through, but not yet holding peaks.

With the mixture running, pour the egg foam into the almond mixture a little at a time so that it forms a dough. Add the almond extract and stir to combine.

Scoop the dough out by the tablespoon (I use my tablespoon-sized cookie scoop for this) and drop onto the prepared cookie sheets, three to a row on a standard-size sheet. Sprinkle all over with pine nuts (for extra flavor, you can also roll the dough in the nuts).

Now, this step is important: Before you put the cookies in the oven, let them sit out at room temperature for 30 minutes. This will make them crisper on the outside, chewy on the inside. Without this step, they’re too chewy. If it’s a particularly humid day, results won’t be as impressive, so you might want to save these for drier weather.

Bake the cookies until nicely browned, 20 to 25 minutes. Let the cookies cool completely on the baking sheets, then carefully peel the parchment off the bottoms (if you try to remove them while they’re still hot, they’ll likely stick).

Yield: About 1 dozen cookies

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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