The first tarte aux pommes that I came upon in Lyon, and on only our third day in the city, was inside the doorway of a bouchon and was so large that, having just been removed from the oven, it was put on its own dining table to cool. A typical French tart consists of three concentric circles of fruit slices. The showcase tart, by virtue of its exceptional diameter (it put me in mind of a giant pizza for a tailgate party), had seven, and each ring of fruit was so exactingly carved and symmetrically placed that the cook could have used a ruler. It looked like, what, an expression of infinity? It was an over-the-top aesthetic act and an early lesson in French pastry—make it beautiful and you will make it scrumptious, because the eater’s sense of anticipation will insure that it is. I badly wanted to eat some. I also wanted to learn how to make one.
Six months later, I did, when I went to a cooking school in Lyon and signed up for all the pastry classes, including a stage (something like an apprenticeship) in the school’s upmarket restaurant. (Me? Pretending to be a pastry chef? Ha!) The tarte aux pommes, I learned, has three components: the apples, which are sliced in beautiful uniformity; homemade applesauce, the base that the apple slices are arranged on; and a pastry half made of butter.
The apples—they’re everything, obviously. But so, too, is that pastry. American pies often include vegetable fat—i.e., hydrogenated shortening, like Crisco—which is reasonably easy to work with and doesn’t fail at warmer temperatures. The result is wonderfully flaky. Less wonderful, it has no flavor. A proper French pastry has the flake and the flavors of butter, a surprising sweet tartness that goes with just about anything, especially fruit. The butter, however, makes the pastry temperamental: work it too hard—knead it with flour as you might bread dough, roll it out as you might pasta—and the result will be glue.
There are several types of temperamental butter pastry in French tradition, pâte this and pâte that, but not much difference among them; they all have roughly the same amount of butter—a lot. There’s one for a savory filling (like quiche), a slightly different one for meat (like pâté en croûte), etc. Fruit tarts are often made with pâte brisée, an inauspicious name. It comes from the verb briser, which means to shatter or break—like a vase that’s dropped—and it is true that the pastry has so much fat and so little liquid that it easily falls apart. In one recent effort, I made what I thought was a textbook example—the dough wrapped tightly around a rolling pin—so beautiful that I was compelled to photograph it, when, while holding the rolling-pin handle in my right hand and trying to find the phone in my pocket with my left, I don’t know what happened, the pastry suddenly crumbled and fell, broken (brisée! ) into more than a dozen irregular pieces. It wasn’t until cooking school that I learned how to live with the fragility of the pâte and to recognize its beauty.
The philosophy: Flour and butter will never get along. They don’t like each other. You want for them to coexist just long enough to make it into a hot oven.
The flour: Pastry flour, never bread flour. Look for one that has a low protein content. In the United States, the information is often posted on the back of the bag. Ten or twelve per cent protein is good for bread, five to six per cent (if you can find it) for pastries. The flour I use, called Frederick, which I buy at Union Square Greenmarket, has eight per cent.
Heat: The enemy. You want cold. I keep my pie molds in the freezer. If I am mixing in a bowl, I store it there, too. The dough’s water element: iced. The yolk: from an egg retrieved at the last minute from the fridge. Even the butter, I cut into a small dice, then refrigerate on a plate. For good measure, I wear latex gloves.
Kneading: Never. After gathering up the dough into a ball, you are allowed a smoosh. One. Not two.
Imperfection: Ugly, in this case, is lovely. There can be streaks and buttery spots in your dough. If you carry on working it, hoping to get a beautifully golden globe, you will ruin it. And, besides, fat under heat recomposes itself: the lumps and streaks disappear. My rolling-pin pastry that shattered into more than a dozen pieces? I reassembled them in the tart pan. I didn’t press the pieces. I placed them. The pastry went into the oven misshapen; it came out looking just fine.
For me, a French apple tart is among our autumnal harmonies—falling leaves, logs in a fireplace, cold-weather smells of cinnamon—and is a favorite go-to dessert for the season. My sons, however, don’t like it. They never have.
“I never saw the point,” George said when I asked.
“Who makes a dessert with apples?” Frederick added. “It’s so lazy. Why would I ever eat apples if I can have chocolate cake instead?”
I pondered the distinction. It reminded me of the Saturday mornings the boys and I spent together in Lyon. I used to take them to a public pool for swimming lessons. Afterward, on our way home, we would stop by les Halles Paul Bocuse, the city’s food hall, for a French pastry. For a few euros, we were rewarded with beautiful mini-dessert classics: tarte au chocolat, Paris–Brest, Saint Honoré, macarons, éclairs, never-pass-them-up pains au chocolat, and much else. In such company, I now see, an apple tart has a hard time competing.
Perhaps we can define what an apple tart is by what it isn’t. It isn’t particularly sweet. American apple pie has much more sugar—and often flour or another starch in the filling. A tarte tatin (apples caramelized on a puff pastry bottom, one of the most famous French desserts) has even more sugar. By comparison, the flavors of apple tart are quite restrained: the fruit cooked and not so cooked, a pastry with the texture of buttered air, and in its presentation a gift, like a painting. It is simple, and, like most French desserts, not so simple.
Tarte aux Pommes
I prefer metric measurements for this recipe, because there is a mathematical harmony to the ingredients that illustrates quite clearly their relationship to the flour (and makes them easy to remember): flour (250 g), butter (125 g), sugar (25 g), salt (5 g).
Serves 6
Ingredients
- 125 g (4 ½ oz.) unsalted butter, plus another 25 g (1 oz.) for buttering pan
- 250 g (9 oz.) pastry flour, plus more for dusting
- 5 g (⅕ oz.) salt
- 25 g (1 oz.) sugar
- 50 ml (1 7/10 oz.) ice water
- 1 egg yolk
- A splash of milk or a lightly beaten egg, to brush onto the pastry
Equipment
- 9- to 11-inch tart pan, with removable bottom
- Latex gloves
- Pastry scraper
- Pince à tarte, or a large fork with a big gap between the tines, or a pair of fish-boning tweezers, for fashioning pastry crust
- Rouleau de pique-vite, or a fork, to prick holes in the pastry
Directions
1. Dice butter and refrigerate.
2. Butter the bottom and sides of the tart pan comprehensively. (I tear off a piece of the waxed paper from a butter stick and use that as a buttering tool.) Using a sieve, dust the pan with a small amount of flour. Rotate pan in a shallow circle to insure that the flour coats the bottom and sides, then tip out excess. Put pan in freezer for 2 minutes, then remove and dust again with flour. Keep pan in freezer until needed.
3. Via a sieve or a sifter, create a mound of the flour in a bowl or on a work surface. Make a well in the center, then add salt, sugar, and ice water. Wearing the latex gloves, mix salt, sugar, and water in the well. Add egg yolk and mix to combine. Add the chilled diced butter to the well, and, working quickly, mix it in with the other ingredients, breaking it up into smaller bits with your fingers, and then gradually pull in the flour. Continue mixing with your fingers until the dough is crumbly and starting to cohere. Compress the mixture gently with your hands to create a ball of dough. Press one more time, with force, flattening the dough lengthwise with the blade of the pastry scraper or your palm to help further amalgamate the butter in the dough. (The smoosh!) Do not knead. Loosely shape the dough into an approximation of a circle, an inch or so thick, being careful not to work it. (I use the pastry scraper to push the dough into shape). Place dough in a plastic bag, using the pastry scraper to transfer it. Refrigerate for 30 minutes or overnight.
4. Dust a work surface with flour. Remove dough from refrigerator; it should feel firm, like a stick of cold butter. Allow it to soften for a few minutes at room temperature—i.e., as little as possible.
5. Remove tart pan from freezer. Dust rolling pin with flour, then roll out pastry in four directions, until it is approximately 3 millimeters (⅛ inch) thick and approximately the same diameter as the tart pan. Again: do not overwork. Dust with flour and brush away the excess. Wrap the dough around your rolling pin, then gently unroll it onto the tart pan. Gently press dough into the pan. Trim the edges by running the rolling pin over the top (this will also have the effect of crushing some of the pastry around the rim). Gently repair any gaps or holes with extra bits of dough. Fashion the crust with the pince à tarte or other implement of your choosing. (The idea is to create a variegated texture, for mouthfeel yumminess.) Using the rouleau pique-vite* or a fork, prick the pastry bottom all over. Wrap in plastic film and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes or overnight.
Ingredients
- 9 or 10 firm, slightly tart apples, such as Matsu, approximately uniform in size
- 55 g (scant 3 oz.) coconut sugar, such as Big Tree Farms, in Indonesia (or substitute brown sugar)
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 25 g (1 oz.) butter, plus 50 g (2 oz.) melted butter
- 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
Equipment
- Apple corer (optional)
- Pastry brush (or any brush)
Instructions
1. Peel, core, and dice 3 apples. Toss them in 40 g (scant 2 oz.) coconut sugar. Set a sauté pan over medium heat. Add the 25 g butter, diced apple, and cinnamon stick. Cook until the apples begin to soften, 5 to 10 minutes. (I prefer the sauce chunky; the French like it rendered smooth with a hand-held blender.) Empty applesauce into a sieve placed over a bowl, to drain the excess liquid, and set aside.
2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
3. In a small bowl, mix together the remaining 15 g (2 Tbsp.) coconut sugar with the ground cinnamon.
4. Peel 5 to 7 apples, depending on size. Slice apples into segments, using one or both of the following methods. Method No. 1—the obvious way, or what the late chef Joël Robuchon describes as “la plus simple” (“the simplest”): cut the apples in half, core them, and then slice into very thin wedges. Method No. 2—“la solution raffinée” (“the refined one”): leaving the apples whole, remove cores using an apple corer or a small paring knife, then slice each apple crosswise into very thin circles, or what will look like evanescent doughnuts. I have tried both methods, and each has its merits. My happiest result uses a combination of the two—3 apples in wedges, 4 apples in rounds.
Assembly
1. Remove pastry from the fridge and add applesauce to cover the bottom.
2. Arrange apple rounds in a circle along the perimeter of the pastry, so that the edges overlap. (Set aside any rounds that are less than uniform. Your cutting board will become a wild terrain of rejected and misshapen bits of fruit.) Brush apple rounds with melted butter. Using a sieve, dust with cinnamon-sugar mixture. Add another layer of apple rounds on top of the first, arranging them so that they cover the doughnut holes in the slices beneath. Brush with butter; dress with sugar mixture again. (I sometimes, and unconventionally, add yet another layer—and something even a fourth—because I like the variations in the result, with each layer cooked differently for a different taste of appleness.)
3. Add another circle inside the outer circle, using the half-slices (i.e., the thin wedges), arranging them very tightly, like a hand-held fan. Brush with butter and dress with sugar. In the remaining space in the center, arrange more half-slices according to the room you have left: e.g., a small, tight circle, plus an aesthetic arrangement of your own devising—stacked like crisscrossing logs or a small flower or whatever the arts-and-crafts skills of your childhood empower you to create. Dust once more with the sugar-and-spice mixture. Brush the rim of the crust with a lightly beaten egg or with milk (lately, milk seems to be used more often).
4. Place the tart on the bottom rack of the oven. Cook for 35 to 40 minutes, rotating the tart 180 degrees midway through, until the applesauce is gently bubbling and the pastry is cooked through and golden brown. (Let the food, rather than the clock, be your guide.) Serve warm or at room temperature.
And to drink? My wife, Jessica Green, recommends Sauternes, the Bordeaux dessert wine. “It is sweeter than the apple tart and has juicy acidity as well as the delicious flavors of apples, orange marmalade, vanilla, and toast.” The pairing, for me, was startling: the wine seemed to complete the tart. A slice and a small glass? A wonderfully autumnal end to a meal.
