On the hunt for the most delicious macaron.
We are nearing the halfway point in the trip and I am torn between feeling like we have been here forever and that our time is flying by too quickly.
Today we made our way down to Saint Germain des Prés to do some shopping, have some lunch at Brasserie Lipp (where we had delicious food and a sweet, sweet waiter who spent 5 minutes trying to help me with my pronunciation of the word “seulement”) and then we headed down to the mecca of food markets, La Grande Epicerie de Paris.
Before our lunch we hunted down the Pierre Hermé pastry store to check out the chocolate and pastries and to buy a selection of their famous macarons so that we could do a taste test with the Gerard Mulot macarons that we had purchased yesterday.
We are still dutifully trying as many baguettes as we can but have now added a new food fascination with the ever ubiquitous French macaron. Actually, we are also obsessed with French salted butter and currently have three different brands in our little fridge but that is another post.
I had never even heard of macarons until a couple of years ago and then, all of a sudden, they seemed to be everywhere. People were eating them, making them and photographing them over and over again. It has been the year (or two) of the French macaron.
It was on our trip last year that I tasted my very first one. I am not sure why but I did not expect to like them. I thought they would be tooth achingly sweet and sugary with a spongy, sticky texture. And to be fair, some are exactly that. However, when you find a very good macaron it is something very special. A macaron should be airy and light, as it is made of egg whites and almond flour that sandwiches a cream filling. Last year we tried macarons from a tiny little cheap and cheerful bakery just off Rue de Abbesses as well as those from the very well known and pricey Ladurée …
This year we sampled the wares from Gerard Mulot and then today we tried the little jewels from Pierre Hermé. With flavours as diverse as Rose Petal, Banana-Ginger, Olive Oil-Vanilla, Sea salt-caramel, Jasmine and good old chocolate it is pretty tough to pick a favourite flavour let alone a favourite purveyor but we are doing our best.
We bought a box of twelve and the best thing was that we found a bench just off the Place Saint Sulpice Square and sat in the sunshine and sampled three of the twelve that we had just purchased. And this was before lunch. A wonderful moment to be a grown-up in Paris.