Welcome to the first installment of many (I hope!) chronicling my baking... In each little episode, I hope to talk about my successes and failures, and how I'd prefer to alter the original recipe.
Recipe can be found
here.Guest baker: Adam
The apples used were Honey Crisp apples, from Trader Joe's. I have to admit I had no idea what kind of apple I was planning on getting for this recipe... I was thinking Granny Smiths, since they tend to retain their shape and not disintegrate when exposed to heat, and their tartness allows for a great apple-y flavor, especially in a sugary dessert. But, at TJ's, we saw Honey Crisp prominently displayed in the front,
and a woman started to rave about how good they were. So why not try them! They were incredibly flavorful, which definitely made the end product. They were slightly tart but not nearly as much as Granny Smiths are. As the name suggests, they are also very crispy, not dense and grainy like Red Delicious apples can be (and a terrible misnomer). They are also but not nearly as much as Fujis are. I'd definitely recommend to err on the side of tarter than sweeter because of how much sugar you add to get your caramelized product. But, these apples were incredible on their own too... I kept sneaking little slices :)
This is a picture of the peeled and quartered apples. I think we ended up peeling about 9 or 10 apples of medium size. We took the advice of the article and used a larger pan than the one we baked in (the one to caramelize the apples was
about 12" I think).
Then, we added the sugar. I had a lot of cane sugar left over (white), so we used that for the vast majority of the sugar, then I had a bag of TJ's sugar that I bought, which is unprocessed raw cane sugar. Over low to medium heat, we heated the apples up with sugar and butter.
That was it! Stir, stir stir, to prevent any of the apples from browning (then the heat would be too high), and the juice seeped from the apples... yummm. The apples got more and more smush-able, but we were careful to keep the slices intact, so that they at least resembled the original product (hopefully to make the end product look nicer than applesauce...). As you can see, they definitely lost their angles, but they were sooooo yummy.
Again, this is where the tartness of the apples comes into play; you get such an apple-y intenseness so that it's very clear that this once came from fresh apples.
This picture shows what we reduced it to... we didn't get quite as much caramelization as I hoped for. When I think caramel, I definitely think of brown sticky liquid... and we didn't get much here. We definitely got the apples to be sticky.... but not brown in color. I hoped that would come later in the baking phase. I tried adding more sugar and waiting to see if it would do anything, and nope. It just dissolved. Regardless, we had cooked apples in butter and lots of sugar; it really could not go wrong (taste-wise).
After the apples were deemed to be thoroughly coated in sugary goodness, we transferred the apples to a smaller pan (10"?). Since the apples had shrunk a lot, the amount we peeled fit quite nicely.
As a crust (if you want to read my original rant on crusts,
click here.), we used just a pre-made, frozen puff pastry. It sure is a lot easier than making it from scratch, and it comes out really nicely. We lay that on top, filling in the gaps on the side with the extra pieces of puff pastry that didn't fit around the edges. Then, we
popped it into our pre-warmed oven at 400 degrees, and let it sit
for a while until the puff pastry looked nice and golden (20 minutes? I can't remember).
Regardless, it ended up looking like this! I think we may have let it sit even a little while longer, but I was so happy to see apple-y liquid percolating underneath the pastry. There was hope yet that it had caramelized further in the oven...
But again, we had cooked apples in butter and lots of sugar; it really could not go wrong.
But, this is what it ended up looking like! Indeed, there were little brown patches (CARAMELIZATION??) and lots of delicious cooked apple on a nice light flaky crust (not just any old crust). Unfortunately, I didn't photograph the dangerous part of flipping a searing hot skillet onto a plate, and hoping that all of the apples come out intact on top of the crust... But it worked out!
This is also when I realized that the pastry chefs in restaurants must have to make the extra caramel on the side that they pour onto the dessert. For some reason, I imagined the tarte would come out steeping in a caramel-y sauce. Silly me.
It was delicious and an extremely fun first try at making one of my favorite desserts ever.
Next installment: brownies?
Simple, but oh so good. Very much a staple in my repertoire... We'll see how a foreign kitchen causes it to turn out...
