Anyone who’s been to Paris and gone to the mecca of the macaron probably recognized the box in the picture I posted yesterday.
Want to see what’s inside?
I thought so.
I had never been to Pierre Hermé before my aunt came. In fact, I was under the impression that I didn’t like macarons. They had always seemed too sweet to me, and so I avoided them and instead bought things like chausson de pommes or palmiers, my favorite French baked good.
But my aunt likes macarons, and I knew that the ones at Pierre Hermé were reputed to be amazing, so off we went to the boutique on rue Vaugirard.
The shop itself is, for lack of a better word… quiet. It’s not in a particularly upscale neighborhood like the Champs Elysées, and yet, when we walked into the store and look at the arrangements of chocolate and macarons, I felt that the only appropriate way to signal my order would be to whisper.
The macarons are beautiful to look at: many of them are dusted with a sort of shimmer dust, and I had a hard time not picking out my three just because they were beautiful.
In the end, we had to make a decision, and so, finally, we let the lady behind the counter know which we had selected.
My aunt chose salted caramel, rose, olive oil and vanilla, and jasmine. The picture above is of the first three of hers.
I decided on olive oil and vanilla, jasmine, and pistachio and black cherry. The last sounded pretty good, but I ended up taking the plunge because of the shimmer dust.
The general consensus? Delicious.
The jasmine one didn’t taste very much like jasmine: it was sweet, but that was about it. I think it was the least favorite of the selection, not because it wasn’t tasty, but because it didn’t taste like what we were expecting.
My aunt loved the rose one though, and I thought the pistachio black cherry one tasted great. The olive oil and vanilla one had a subtle olive oil flavor that we both liked a lot.
But my favorite was the one I had considered, been afraid to taste, and then run back to buy because I thought I needed it:
Wasabi and grapefruit. The wasabi scared me off a little in the beginning, but in the end, I decided it was pure genius. The sour flavors of the grapefruit and the hint of heat from the wasabi helped the macaron to move past what had, to me, always seemed like a gratuitously sweet treat to becomes something heavenly.