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The original was posted on /r/askculinary by /u/nagumi on 2023-10-03 16:16:03.

So normally I make my meringue cookies as follows:

4 large egg whites, beaten with 1/2tsp cream of tartar and 1/8tsp salt. I slowly add 200g sugar that I have put in the blender to make the crystals smaller, then beat until very stiff, and add 1tsp vanilla or almond extract. I then put in a piping bag and pipe out and bake for 70 minutes at 105c.

Recently I’ve started baking them at 85c for 90 minutes and have been getting more consistent results, with the whole batch coming out perfect instead of certain over-heated areas of the oven causing cracking.

The meringues come out perfectly crisp, with no voids. Delicious! But this time I used a Lorann’s Oils Lemon Bakery Emulsion (it’s not an oil - that’s just the company name) instead of vanilla or almond extract. I’ve done this before with their strawberry emulsion and it was the same - crisp with no voids. This time, however, with the lemon emulsion, the outside was perfectly crisp but the inside was soft and pillowy, almost like it was underbaked, but not exactly. When you underbake meringue and then eat it, the soft part becomes hard when chewed, almost like a hard candy. In this case, it remains soft and pillowy, with stretch.

Usually, if your meringue is still soft in the center it’s due to unevaporated moisture, which quickly (in hours) leads to the outside of the meringue becoming soft and sticky. In this case, it’s been 20 hours and the outside is still crisp with the soft pillowy inside. The inside even has a bit of stretch to it when I pull it apart.

The ingredients on the lemon emulsion: Water, propylene glycol, “natural flavors”, gum acacia, xanthan gum, sodium benzoate.

The ingredients on the strawberry emulsion (which did not cause the pillowy center): Water, propylene glycol, “natural and artificial flavors”, triacetin, alcohol, beet juice extract, xanthan gum, fd&c red No. 40, FD&C blue No. 1

The ingredients that are in the lemon but not in the strawberry: gum acacia and sodium benzoate.

The only other difference I can think of in how I prepared it is that the sugar wasn’t ground down all the way, and the meringue was still a little “gritty” due to undissolved sugar when I piped it, but barely at all.

Any idea how I can replicate this in the future? Ideally without the lemon, as honestly the flavor of this extract wasn’t great in the cookies. Thanks!