How Ladurée Makes Millions Of Macarons With A 130 Year Old Recipe Insider Food

Every day, Lotteré makes tens of thousands of macarons, in pastry labs just like this one. The company sells its colorful cookies across 30 countries. But it all started here in Paris, with a macaron recipe that hasn't changed for over 130 years. Today, we dive into how Lotteré went from inventing the double-decker macaron to becoming a part of an estimated billion-dollar cookie empire. Today, there are over 110 Lotteré locations in more than 50 cities worldwide. The shops serve croissant and a myriad of other French pastries. But carrying the brand is the macaron, rainbow in its shade and Parisian chic in its ethos. So chic, it costs about $3 per macaron. A steep price, driven by expensive ingredients and a notoriously tricky baking process. It all starts with California almonds. We make the shells, so the macaron shells, out of almonds, whole almonds that we use, that we grind ourselves, with icing sugar and then an Italian meringue, egg whites and sugar syrup. If you're getting a macaron from one of Lotteré's international locations, it was made in Switzerland. Lotteré says the macarons aren't frozen. Instead, they're cooled to what Lotteré calls a hibernation state before being shipped globally. But if you're in a shop in Paris or another French city, those macarons are made every day, here at the Morangie Lab outside of Paris. And this is then baked for about 20 minutes. Apart from that, we make the filling, which can be a jam, chocolate ganache or a caramel. And then we fill the macaron with that filling. Then they rest for about eight hours to 24 hours to get that nice, soft texture. And then we ship them to the stores. The perfect macaron has a crunchy outer layer, a soft inside and just the right amount of filling. If it's not perfect, it's tossed. Two essential steps that we have here at Lotteré is to get the right texture in the batter. It's not too runny, not too stiff, so the macaron gets that perfectly round shape. Not too big, so then you can't put it in the boxes and all that. And then the second stage, as I was talking about, is that maturation process, where it all comes together with the filling, the shell that gets that nice texture. At the Morangie Pastry Lab, chefs make 3,200 macarons a day, using a recipe that hasn't changed since the cookie's invention in the late 1800s. You can't write that down. You can't just explain it with math. It's literally just a skill that they've developed. And they can tell. They can look at it. They can tell if it's good or not. They can taste it and tell you that in two days, this macaron will be ready. What has changed are the flavors. There are at least 20 mainstay flavors, including rose, pistachio, and vanilla. Lotteré's pastry chefs like Guillaume are constantly developing new ones, sometimes based on seasons, like rose and cardamom for Mother's Day in Paris, and other times based on location, like the hemp macaron and a vegan line sold in Los Angeles. Louis-Ernest Lotteré founded his namesake bakery off Rue Royale in Paris back in 1862, but it was actually his cousin, Pierre de Fonteyn, who created the version of the macaron we know today. When he sandwiched two almond meringues around chocolate ganache in the 1890s, Pierre's idea was a hit and was soon copied by patisseries across the city. But it would take 135 years from the original macaron company to branch out into another location on the Champs-Élysées. This expansion began after the Lotteré family sold the brand to the Holder Group, owners of the bakery chain Paul, in the 1990s. The Holder Group repositioned Lotteré as a high-end cookie house, imitating luxury fashion houses. In the late 90s, Lotteré introduced new macaron flavors, set to seasonal releases of fashion lines. Then the colorful cookies showed up beside Haute Couture and French Aisle and Vogue, and the rebranding worked. Suddenly a symbol of luxury, Lotteré went from selling 3,000 macaron a day to 10,000 by 2002. Soon, food and travel bloggers began writing about the macaron, cementing Lotteré as a travel destination likened to the Eiffel Tower. As Lotteré's global influence spread with travelers and fashionistas, so did its macaron. In 2005, Lotteré opened its first international location in London. Then, three years later, another in Japan. In the U.S., the macaron's appearance in the film Marie Antoinette and the TV show Gossip Girl popularized the cookie. And in 2011, Lotteré opened its first U.S. location, off Madison Avenue in New York City. Today, Lotteré is the world's foremost provider of the famous French macaron, helping its parent conglomerate reach a billion dollars in revenue in 2018. Because we make it for them, you know, for our customers. You go to Japan and people tell you, oh, you know, it's so good, that thing I tried, whatever, and you come back to Paris, they tell you the same thing, and that's really touching, you know?