First let me say, I was so busy baking yesterday and taking care of my two needy girls I didn’t have a chance to properly post anything, so I will be doubling up today! There has been a lot going on in the kitchen lately! Ok, onto the post…
About once a month, a group of us girls gets together to play bunco, eat treats and socialize, sans kids… well except for little Mei! I bring her along because she is small, quiet and I have no one to leave her with. For each of these bunco nights, we all bring a dish of some sort to share with the others and the last time I made the Smith Island cake, a rich peanut butter chocolate cake, so this time, keeping with my seasonal baking plans, I made a tart. An apple tart.
Then I had to choose which apple tart recipe I wanted to make. Inspired plenty of times by Carla Hall’s individual free-form tarts from Top Chef, I decided that I would make individual free-form apple tarts! So many people in the blog-o-sphere have been baking in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Alice Water’s Chez Panisse, so in keeping with the trend and lending our contribution we decided to use Alice Water’s recipe for apple tart.
butter, butter you're so nice!
Alice Water’s recipe is really designed for a large tart pan, but I figured I would just make the recipe for the dough and roll it out and cut out smaller circular sections to form my individual tarts with… until it actually came to punching out the dough circles, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I have decided to make September the month for apples! There are a handful of apple recipes I have been wanting to make, but I have been pushing myself to wait until September when the seasonal summer fruits would be waning so I have been making a list and (impatiently) waiting for September to arrive.
So what’s in store for September? First I would like to point out that September is half over so I will be hopping to and working on my list ASAP. Here is the list!
- My go-to Apple pie! I want to perfect the crust and seasoning for the filling so that I will never try to make another apple pie recipe after this.
- Apple tart (obviously the post for today… CHECK!)
- Marie-Helene’s Apple Cake (a catch-up recipe for FFwD)
- Apple Butter, is there anything better???
- Apple Bundt Cake
- Apple Cheddar Scones
- Baked Apple Cider Donut Holes
I should just buy a truckload of apples to get me started!! The apple butter alone is going to require a silly amount of apples, which I plan to get at the store pretty soon… in the next day or two, cuz its going to take a few days to make… but now I’m getting ahead of my own posts. Back to the apple tart!
Alice Water, back to you! I got to peeling, coring and slicing apples (I have a feeling I’m going to get pretty good at this over the next two weeks…), set them aside and then got to making the tart dough. All that needs to be said about the dough is that it is not for the faint hearted. If you are against using butter like Julia Child’s would use butter, then this recipe is not for you. On the plus side, the amount of butter ensures that your crust will be tasty, flaky and full of buttery goodness!
dough ball!
When it came time to roll out the dough, I quickly realized that once it was rolled out, it woudn’t allow me to roll the scraps left after punching out circular dough wheels for the individual tarts, back into a ball to roll back out to punch more circles. So I had four individual tarts, a few scraps (since I started with a quarter of the dough), and about 3/4 of the original dough left. I had no choice but to abandon the individual free form tart idea and go back to using a 9 inch fluted tart pan with a removable tray inside.
More butter! Buttered the tart pan, and rolled out the dough so that for the most part I would get close to having a 2 -2 1/2 inch overhang of dough once the dough was set in the tart pan, but I didn’t care for it to be perfectly circular because it looked fluted and rustic if the edges were uneven. While I rolled out the dough over and over again until it was the thickness and size that I needed, I put all the reserved peels and cores in a saucepan, covered it with water and set it on a long simmer to draw out some amazing apple flavor and make a syrup that will go over the finished tart, giving the apples plenty of flavor. I considered putting a bit of cinnamon in the syrup but since I will be making so many items that will be “spiced” over the next two months, I decided to keep the flavor unabashedly apple, and nothing but. Oh, I chose some nice, tart, Granny Smith apples for those of you that are wondering.
I practiced my fruit fluting skills and laid down two layers of fanned out apple quarters to fill the entire tart and a bit more, although after it baked up I realized I could have easily added a third layer of apples, bringing the apple count to 12. I brushed the top with (more) butter, so delicious! And generously sprinkled the top with regular old granulated sugar. In the oven it went! While the tart baked, I kept an eye on the simmering apple syrup.
I feel like Amelia Bedelia would make an apple tart like this..
Time came to pull the tart out of the oven and begin to cool it when I strained the apple syrup of the large chunks of apple core and peel and I noticed how thin this syrup was, but Alice Water is brilliant and I chose to trust her. I took a small dry measure cup to scoop up some of the apple syrup and pour it over the apples through the hole in the center of the tart. Later, in transport, after the tart had been out of the fridge for about 45 minutes, I realized that the syrup was slowly escaping and had never truly set up like a syrup. Made a mental note to change the method for the syrup next time, I’m pretty sure I will be pouring on the syrup before the tart goes into the oven.
I chilled the tart after this and just hours before I was ready to leave the house, I decided to make some buttery caramel to drizzle over the cake, to play on caramel apples a bit, which turned out to be better in theory than in practice. This was due to a lack of cream (shocking, I know), so once the caramel was ready, I just whisked in a stick of butter and poured it over the apples in the tart. Within minutes, the caramel hardened over the apples instead of staying a bit gooey as I had envisioned, and my heart sank. Making a second mental note, I wrapped the whole thing in plastic and stuck it back in the fridge to cool the caramel before we got ready to head out for some bunco and chit-chat.
all dolled up!
I know bunco sounds like an old lady game, but its pretty fun for being a rather mindless game to play while catching up on kids, life and whatever else came to mind with some friends while gorging on sweet snacks. My tart was swimming in apple “syrup” once I got it to bunco and looked fairly unappetizing. And by the end of the night, only two slices had been eaten out of it… and one of those slices were eaten by me. Sad face. I took the “leftover” tart to a friend’s house and received a consensus on my notes about the tart, but after an irresistible taste test, confirmed that the crust was delicious and flaky, the caramel hard and delicious, and the apples had a great flavor and were soft baked… but on the whole? The tart slice didn’t hold together and the bottom was soaked in the syrup which means that if it met some other tarts at a tart party, the other tarts would point and laugh.
Sigh.
Tasty, but *sigh.*
I don’t know that I will make this again before November, but I did like the taste of all the components and it would have been a finger lickin’ good tart if the tart wasnt soaked in apple syrup and the caramel had been more gooey so I could drizzle it over the top of the tart in a fun pattern without being completely crunchy.
Whatever happened to the little individual tart cut outs you ask? I used my three leftover nectarines that I found in my fridge to make free-form nectarine tarts. Someone has to check to see if it’s going to be a yummy tart without taking a slice out first right?? I peel and pitted the nectarines, sliced them up and put in as many slices as one little dough round would hold. Folding the dough over onto itself, I also made two apple empanadas in addition to the two nectarine tarts. I didn’t include any seasoning or syrup on these or butter, and while the flavors were more subtle, the ripeness of the fruit shinned through, leaving the nectarines to ooze out their delicious golden juices, making a perfect, crisp, flaky, fruity tart for breakfast. It was heaven!
my little nectarine tart
Despite the “syrup” adventures and the overly hardened caramel, this is a tart I would make again! In fact, it is such an easy tart to put together that I would make this with any leftover, ripe seasonal fruit any day of the week! Or everyday of the week! This could easily join my rotation instead of scones in the morning!
Ingredients for the dough (the most important part!):
- 1 C unbleached, all-purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp sugar
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 6 TBS unsalted butter, soft, cut into pieces
- 3-1/2 TBS chilled water (or more, read below)
Ingredients for the filling:
- 2 lbs of apples, peeled, cored, sliced (peels and cores reserved)
- 2 TBS unsalted butter, melted
- 5 TBS sugar
Mix the flour, sugar and salt in a large bowl, add 2 TBS of butter. Blend in a mixer until the dough resembles coarse meal. Add the remaining butter and mix until pea-sized lumps form. Or to do it by hand, mix all the dry ingredients together with a whisk until incorporated, then work the butter in with your fingertips until pea sized lumps form.
Dribble in the water a tablespoon at a time, stir, and dribble in more water until the dough holds together. Toss with your hands and keep tossing and adding water until it becomes a dough. This doesn’t take much water at all, so be slow, but don’t overwork the dough either.
Once you have the dough, flatten it into a 4-inch thick disk, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. After 30 minutes, or longer if you can’t get back to it quickly, remove the dough and let it soften a bit until it is malleable but still cold. smooth the cracks at the edges and place on a lightly floured surface. Use a rolling-pin to roll the disk into a 14 inch circle that is about 1/8 inches thick. As you roll out the dough, flip the dough over, roll it out, flip and roll, this will help you to get a more uniformly circular shape, although you want the edges to naturally “scallop” for a rustic look to your tart. You want about an extra two inches of dough to overhang on the pan. Once you are done rolling, dust off the excess flour with a pastry brush.
Place the dough in a greased 9 inch tart pan, or on a parchment lined baking sheet for a free-form tart. Preheat the oven to 400F/ 200 C.
Overlap the apple slices on the dough. If you have sliced the apples in sections and kept them in their sections, they will fan out much more easily. Fold the overhanging dough back onto itself, crimping every quarter-inch or as necessary. Brush the melted butter over the edges and the apples, sprinkle the sugar over everything. Feel free to use a little more sugar if you like.
Bake the entire tart until the edges have browned and the apples have softened, about 45 minutes. Rotate the pan every 15 minutes for even browning.
To make the syrup, put the reserved peels and cores in a large saucepan with the sugar and pour in enough water to cover the apples, simmer for thirty minutes and then strain the mixture through a fine mesh sieve.
Remove the tart from the oven, pour the syrup over the tart and serve.