Tutorial: Swiss Meringue Buttercream Troubleshooting

 Many people have trouble with Swiss meringue buttercream. If you haven't, you could at any time. There are lots of little things that can go wrong.

If you've never made Swiss meringue buttercream, it is based on egg whites and sugar with butter added later. So, first combine egg whites and sugar with a whisk. You want to combine them in a heat-proof bowl, so either metal or glass. 

The mixture will be rather thick. Then, heat the bowl on top of a pot with boiling water in it. This bowl will not come in direct contact with the heat or with the water, just set the bowl on top of the pot. This is called a double boiler.

Now, Troubleshooting Number One: Egg whites are chunky.

Heating the mixture over a double boiler is a very gentle way of heating it. We use this when too much heat could burn or overcook something. In this case, if you heat the egg white mixture too hot, it will begin to cook the eggs. We weren't making an omlette.

Solution: Unfortunately, if you have overheated your egg whites to the point where they are chunky, there's no saving it and you will have to discard the mixture and start over.

How to avoid the problem: You only want to heat the mixture until you don't feel any more grains of sugar and the mixture begins to feel hot to the touch. However, you should be able to touch it. If it gets uncomfortably hot to touch, it is too hot. If you have heated it properly, it will look very thin, much more liquid than before. There will also be a decent amount of foam on top of the mixture.

Next, whip your sugar/egg white mixture until you reach stiff peaks.

Troubleshooting Number Two: Your egg whites won't reach stiff peaks.

This is not the most common problem, but it can happen sometimes. There are a couple possible causes: either the mixture is too hot because the room it is cooling in is too hot, or the bowl you are using wasn't clean and has contaminated your mixture, or your egg whites are mixed with some egg yolk and that has contaminated the mixture.

Solution: So, the most common reason is contamination of the mixture. If this is the case, you may not be able to reach stiff peaks. Soft peaks will also work. However, if you can't even reach soft peaks, then you may not be able to make this recipe with the contamination.

If your room is very hot, try refrigerating the mixture for half an hour and try again to beat them to stiff peaks.

How to avoid the problem: Make sure to clean your bowl really thoroughly before using it, including drying it. You don't want water in the mixture, either. Also separate your eggs in a separate bowl and add it to the mixing bowl only when you are sure the egg white is clean.

At this stage, make sure the bowl you are using is completely cool and room temperature. Cut the butter into pieces and add them to the meringue a bit at a time at low speed.

Troubleshooting Number Three: The butter won't combine with the meringue properly.

In that case, your mix might look something like this:

This is most often caused by a difference in temperature between your meringue and the butter. For example, if your meringue is slightly warm, but the butter had just been taken out the fridge. In that case, the temperature difference causes slight condensation on the meringue, which doesn't mix well with the butter, since water and oil don't mix.

Solution: You can help with this by refrigerating the mixture for half an hour to an hour and try beating it again for at least a full five minutes.

If that doesn't work, you can add a bit more butter to get it to come together. However, this will cause the buttercream to look slightly strange. It will still taste great, but it will have a strange texture. Something like this:

Of course, this may or may not work for your project. 

How to avoid the problem: Make sure to use room temperature butter to add to your room temperature meringue.

There is another problem that can occur at this stage:

Troubleshooting Number Four: The meringue/butter mixture is very liquid and won't come together despite beating for more than 15 minutes.

 It may look something like this:

Now, this may be a normal phase of the buttercream. It can often take a long time of beating to get the buttercream to come together. However, you know when you've been beating long enough that it should have come together already. In that case, you may have added the butter before the meringue was really room temperature and the warm meringue has melted your butter. Either that, or the room you are making the buttercream is very warm and the butter has melted. Either way, you have melted butter in your buttercream.

This is probably the number one most common problem with Swiss meringue buttercream. 

Solution: However, if you chill the buttercream in the fridge for an hour or two, it should be able to be beaten into buttercream. If two hours didn't help, try four. If four doesn't do it, try chilling it overnight. That should definitely do the trick, if this is really the problem. It may take some time to beat into smooth buttercream after the butter is no longer liquid, but it should set up after about 5-10 minutes of beating, in general.

How to avoid the problem: You may not have any control over the temperature of the room, but you can definitely be extra careful that your meringue is room temperature before adding the butter. If you think the meringue might be too warm still, try refrigerating it for 10-20 minutes to be sure it's cool enough not to melt the butter.

For this buttercream, beating or temperature changes are almost always the answer. It's very sensitive to temperature changes and becomes more smooth the more it's beaten. Extra beating should bring it to this stage:

I really hope these tips helped you avoid the common problems or helped you to fix an existing problem.

Watch us talk about these buttercream problems on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/9wKGHe5zeO4
Schaut zu wie wir über diese Buttercreme Probleme auf unserem YouTube reden hier: https://youtu.be/_zm44Zmwics