Wednesday, April 12, 2006

I made the macaroons today. They will be done dehydrating by tomorrow. The ingredients I used were:

• 1 cup almonds, soaked for 8 hours
• 4 medjool dates, soaked for 2 hours
• 1/2 cup the water from the dates
• 1/2 tablespoon almond extract (probably isn't a raw ingredient!)
• 1/2 cup shredded coconut

The coconut was difficult to shred using a hand grater, which is what I thought I could get away doing, so I had to switch to a food processor. An entire coconut provided a bit more than 1/2 cup of shredded meat.

I combined all of the ingredients at once to the blender. After attempting to blend it I wish I had put the almonds in first and blended those before adding the other ingredients, because the mixture just wouldn't blend after a few minutes. No amount of stirring could get it moving, so I switched everything to a food processor. I was hoping that would do a better job of pulverizing the almonds and actively mixing everything. It did a much better job, but Chef Felicia still found a big almond piece in one of the macaroons!

After blending all the ingredients I was supposed to be able to shape the macaroons and drop them onto the dehydrator tray. Unfortunately, the dough was too moist, like soft cream cheese. I couldn't thicken it up because there were no more soaked almonds. Oh, well. I dropped about 25 of them on the tray and had a little dough left, which I put in the fridge. Now, I must say that 1/2 of these cookies have 2 dates and the other half have 3. I wanted to make one side less sweet because our experience has been that dehydrating enhances the flavors- salty food is saltier, spicy food is spicier.
Below is the tray of macaroons. Felicia says they look good. They dehydrate at 105 degree F for 12 - 24 hours. I set the dehydrator to close to 110 at first, then turned it down to 105 since the outsides were getting hard by the time 3 hours had gone by.

Now, I must admit that I tasted one and didn't think it was sweet enough, but like I said, they might get sweeter when more moisture has left them. If I make them again, I think I will roll them in the coconut shreds rather than blending the coconut into them.

Hope that was informative! We'll let you know how they turn out. If anyone has variations on this recipe, feel free to share them!