Tarte Tatin

My husband loves apple pie, so I was looking forward to presenting him with a tarte tatin. Regular apple pie is not high on my list of favorite desserts, especially if the apple pie in question is double-crust instead of "Dutch" style with a crumb topping. Nevertheless, I thought tarte tatin's layer of caramel and caramelized apples sounded like an improvement over other apple pies, and the challenge of the famously finicky French dessert appealed to me.

Unfortunately, my tarte tatin did not turn out exactly as a tarte tatin should be. It almost lacked caramel entirely. I will get into details below, but I blame the missing caramel on a bad recipe. In spite of the under-caramelization of my tarte tatin, it was unexpectedly luscious. In fact, I think I ate as many slices of it as my apple-pie-loving husband. So, even though I hope my next attempt at tarte tatin will turn out a little differently, this version was go down as a qualified success.

Like any other pie, I began by making the crust. Having now compared several recipes for tarte tatin, it appears there is a discrepancy about the proper type of pastry to use. Many recipes use "standard" pie pastry (Pâte brisée), others use puff pastry (Pâte feuilletée), and others use pâte brisée modified with the addition of sugar. The recipe I followed claimed that it is typical to also add an egg, although I have come across no other recipe that does so. In the end, it turned out that I liked the pastry on my tarte tatin (with egg and powdered sugar) far more than I like regular pie crust.

I do not have a food processor that is the proper voltage for Switzerland, so I made my pastry manually, using a pastry cutter to distribute cold bits of butter in the flour. The combination of freezing cold weather and an open kitchen window is a boon to pastry-making! In Houston, my kitchen was rarely cool enough to make a good pie crust. Here, all I had to do was open one of my three kitchen windows, and in ten minutes, I had the perfect pastry environment. The pastry dough rested in the refrigerator for one hour.

While the pastry dough chilled in the refrigerator, I began the apple portion of the tarte tatin. First, I peeled, cored, and quartered five green apples that tasted a lot like the Golden Delicious variety. Next, I cooked butter and sugar in a skillet until the butter stopped foaming, and then made a ring of the apple quarters in the pan, each quarter propped up on one of its cut sides.



Per the recipe, I cooked the apples on the first cut side for about 3 minutes over medium, then turned them to the other cut side, and cooked for at least another 3 minutes, until the caramel between the apple slices was a dark amber color.

I laid the rolled-out pastry over the apples, tucked the pastry edges down the sides of the skillet, and baked in the oven. After the tarte baked and cooled just a bit, I tried to flip the tarte out. Not only did I burn my hand on the skillet, there was a lot of liquidy juice (not wonderful, viscous caramel) in the bottom of the pan that spilled onto the countertop.

Over the next few days, we ate every bit of the delicious tart, but I could not get over my disappointment that it did not turn out like an authentic tarte tatin. I compared the recipe that I had followed, from America's Test Kitchen's The Family Baking Book, to the tarte tatin recipe in The New Best Recipe, another ATK cookbook. I think the apple-cooking technique in The Family Baking Book is what led me awry. The recipe in The New Best Recipe used almost identical amounts of ingredients and skipped the short pre-cooking of the butter and sugar, but cooked the apples over high heat for up to 12 minutes on the first cut side and then another 5 minutes on the second cut side, a total of 17 minutes of apple cooking time.

Surely cooking my apples longer, over a higher heat, would have led to more caramelization and less loose juice. The next time I make this dessert, this knowledge should lead me to a superior tart. In the meantime, I will be sure to research my recipes more thoroughly, and trust The New Best Recipe as more reliable than The Family Baking Book.