Adding a French flavor to simple apple tarts
September 25, 2002 - The Boston Globe
PARIS - An apple tart is simplicity defined: a buttery dough, a layer of apple compote, and thinly sliced apples to cover the top.
Somehow, though, getting a tart just right isn’t as easy as it looks.
Every baker who makes a classic tart has a secret. With so few ingredients going into this dessert, each should be chosen carefully. Use the best butter and a good apple, experts say, and you can reproduce something you’ve seen in a pastry shop window.
Christy Timor of Brookline’s Clear Flour Bread Bakery, who returned recently from a French bakery tour, suggests a ‘‘tender’’ unsalted butter with a high fat content. She likes a professional quality butter and mentions the Plugra brand as a favorite. ‘‘Unsalted butter tends to have more flavor and freshness by default because it has a shorter shelf life,’’ she says.
‘‘On particularly hot days, put everything - even the flour - in the fridge. If it’s muggy out,’’ Timor says, ‘‘the flour will have absorbed a lot of humidity from the air.’’ The dough won’t need much more water.
French pastry chef Christian Vabret agrees. He says the temperature of the ingredients is crucial, but he is most concerned with the butter and eggs. Vabret is a Meilleur Ouvrier de France (’‘best worker of France’‘), the French food equivalent of being knighted. He’s also the founder and president of L’Ecole Francaise de Boulangerie (The French Bakery School). Most importantly, he makes a mean apple tart.
Butter and the eggs ‘‘are the most vulnerable to temperature, and the most important to work with while they’re cold.’‘
Vabret also talks about the difference between ceramic pie plates and aluminum tart pans. ‘‘Use ceramic for something that needs to cook longer and aluminum for fillings that take less time.’‘
To construct the tart, Gontran Cherrier, 23, the youngest professor at l’Ecole de Boulangerie et de Patisserie de Paris (The Paris Bakery and Pastry School), chooses a traditional pate brisee crust, which is a combination of flour and butter left to rest in the refrigerator for one hour. His is the consistency of cold Play-Doh, and a thumb poke leaves a thumb print.
Cherrier is a walking tips manual. All four grandparents and both parents are bakers. He demonstrates how to roll the dough, sparingly flicking the counter with flour (’‘too much flour kills it’‘). To keep the pastry round as he rolls it out, he spins it one-eighth of a turn every few seconds, and stops rolling when the pastry is about one-eighth-inch thick.
Next, he rolls his pique-vite over the dough. Literally translated as a ‘‘sting fast,’’ it looks like a paint roller with nails that pierce the dough with tiny holes to keep the crust from bubbling up during baking.
Cherrier grabs a hunk of butter like it’s chalk and paints the insides of the tart pan, not bothering to get in every nook and cranny as, ‘‘it finds its way in while it’s baking.’‘
Then he drapes the dough over the tin leaving plenty of extra around the edges. Finally, he makes a compote, peeling, coring and halving apples, then stewing them until the puree is dry. He uses a small paring knife to make apple slices and sets them overlapping around the edge of the tart in a ring. Then he adds another layer so the compote is completely covered. A dash of cinnamon, a sprinkling of sugar, and a couple of dots of butter over the top, and it goes into the oven.
To test the experts’ ideas, I make a dough for the first time in my life. Everything comes together surprisingly easily in less than half an hour.
The next day, Canadian-born Paris poet, Lisa Pasold, helps assemble two tarts. I work on the compote (very easy) and Lisa rolls out the dough, ‘‘stings’’ it with a fork, and eases it into the tart pan. The compote goes in, then the apples. Thirty minutes later, we pull out tarts that not only look, but even taste, French.
This story ran on page E3 of the Boston Globe on 9/25/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
