Macarons

One of my favorite French treats is the macaron.  You can find them almost anywhere in Paris: frozen ones in the grocery store and fresh ones in every bakery.  Ladurée is an old Parisian patisserie that is famous for their macarons, beautiful salons de thé, and other decadent desserts.  In fact, it was the bakery where someone first thought of putting together the two almond cookie shells with a filling to make the modern macaron cookie. It has been my go-to macaron source for years.  I was recently in the neighborhood of one of the Ladurée salons de thé and I picked up a salted butter caramel macaron to eat while walking through the courtyards of the Louvre.  It felt like a perfect Parisian moment.

Last year one of my favorite sources for restaurant recommendations in Paris put together a list of five great places for macarons.  Reading the list inspired me to do a taste test of my own.  I picked up a few macarons from the top three patisseries on the list: Pierre Hermé, Ladurée, and Gérard Mulot.  I bought the same flavors from each bakery to allow for a direct comparison and ended up with caramel and chocolate macarons from each.

I set up our tasting so that J would not know which cookies were from which store.  We cut each macaron in half, tasted one flavor at a time, and ranked them.  They were all delicious, but the best cookie in each category was the perfect combination of good texture, good filling-to-cookie ratio, and rich flavor.  I was surprised to find that we both consistently preferred the Pierre Hermé macarons, followed by those from Ladurée, with Gérard Mulot coming in third place.  I would still recommend visiting Ladurée to have lunch or dessert in one of their beautiful tea rooms, but I think we will be visiting Pierre Hermé to buy macarons again soon.