Classic French Apple Tart

I have never had an apple tart before this; however, I'm big on apple pies (especially around the holidays). If good enough, this tart may appear at this year's Thanksgiving instead of it's pie relative.

Sacrificial apples (and a hiding lemon)

You may ask yourself, "What is the difference between a tart and a pie?"

Well, I'm here to tell you that there really isn't much of a difference. Tarts only have a bottom crust, whereas pies can have a bottom crust, top crust, or both, otherwise they're pretty much the same.

This time I finally read through the sections of The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Pastry Arts that I skipped over prior to my last Fresh Fruit Tart. And it made me realize how I really need to learn more about the ingredients and the process before just diving into the recipes. My new findings helped me understand the process in making a delicious dough, and I believe that I figured out what I did wrong with my shortbread dough.

Here's my understanding of it....
Pastry dough is all about the butter. The entire process of making tart dough is to create a delicious flaky crust, which can only be done by keeping the butter cold.

The butter is first mixed with the sugar until it creates a granular paste:

Maybe it doesn't look super granular here, but I swear it is! This step allows the sugar crystals to cut the butter into tiny pieces, aerating the mixture. The last ingredient to be mixed in is the flour. A tough tart shell can easily be prevented by not overworking the dough. The more you mix the dough while it has flour, the more the gluten in the flour reacts, making the final product less tasty (you want more gluten to react in breads to help out the yeast, but not in tart dough). With the aerated butter mixed in with the flour, your dough should now have tiny pockets of butter, which when baked will create your flaky crust when each of the butter pockets evaporate. Ok, that's the lesson for the day.....on to the apple tart! The dough.... This time I decided to try a new dough so I made the Pâte Sucrée (sweet tart dough). I mixed together my ingredients as discussed above, rolled out my beautiful tart dough, gently placed it in my tart pan and cut it to fit by rolling over the edges with a rolling pin. Then I gently pushed the tart shell down to make sure it was even. Gorgeous dough lining the tart shell The apple filling... This tart really tested out my knife skills with a covering of apples sliced  3 mm thin and an interior layer of apples diced into tiny 6 mm cubes. I cooked the apple cubes on the stove, adding the seeds of a vanilla bean, and cooking it until the apples became translucent but still had a little crunch to them. Adding vanilla bean seeds to my apple cubes (TIP: If planning on baking a significant amount, order some vanilla beans in a larger quantity online -- I ordered some from Amazon -- it's a much better deal than any local grocery store) Once the apple cubes were done cooking and then cooled, I gently spread them inside the unbaked shell. Unfortunately I completely underestimated the amount of cubes produced with 3 apples, so this layer ended up a little skimpy. Spreading out my first layer of apple

The next layer of apples were first peeled, cored, rubbed with a lemon, and sliced lengthwise just like you would eat an apple if you were going to cut it up. The only real difference is that instead of slicing it into quarters or eighths you cut it into 3 mm thick slices (although maybe you cut it into 3 mm slices to eat it...).

Once there's a big stockpile of thinly sliced apples, begin laying them down touching the outer edge of the tart shell and overlapping. I found that the overlapping is wonderful because it can hide a lot of mistakes on your apple slices (e.g. small pieces, pieces that may not be the exact same thickness throughout, etc.).

Overlapping my apple slices

Continue adding circles of overlapping apple slices until the first layer of apple cubes are completely covered. The book only showed two circles of apple slices; however, I have discovered that my tart pan is a touch too big (also explains my insufficient amount of apples) -- it's 13 inches instead of the recommended 9 inch pan (to be honest, I thought there was just a standard tart pan size) -- so I had three circles of apple slices.

I threw the tart in the oven for an hour (the entire recommended amount of time) while surrounding the edges of the tart shell with aluminum foil for all but maybe 10 minutes of the baking time to prevent them from burning. I topped it off with an apricot glaze, took a bunch of pictures, and ate about half of it in one sitting with David's help! Needless to say, it was delicious...and not just any kind of delicious, French delicious. You know, where you think it's going to be super sweet because in America most desserts are (not that I'm always against that), but in reality it's just sweet enough to leave you wanting more.

My first apple tart, but not my last!

Sad filling :(

Analysis of Product:

• Delicious although I wish there were more substance to it. I blame that on not having enough apples for the size of the tart (see image to the right). I even had to roll the tart dough down the edges before baking because it looked silly having an extra half-an-inch or so of crust above the filling!

• The tart dough was definitely a success! The sweet tart dough was much less heavy compared to the shortbread dough I made for the Fresh Fruit Tart. The shortbread dough was much more like a big cookie, whereas the sweet tart dough was more like a typical crust. The dough also rolled out well so I was able to get a nice thin, even layer throughout the entire tart. It was also cooked all the way through without burning the crust thanks to the aluminum foil protecting the edges!

• My slicing and dicing skills have definitely improved since my first attempt at dissecting an apple (it took me an hour to cut up one apple into approximately 5mm sticks and cubes)! Most of my apple cubes and slices looked pretty accurate, but I think that the baking of the tart is the true test. Logically, it seems like when the apples were cut a little too thin, they darkened faster than the other, slightly thicker pieces...what a horrible give away to my mistakes!