Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Tarte Tatin



It’s the second anniversary of the Tuesdays with Dorie group, so the group founder Laurie picked this week’s recipes. Being such a great group leader, Laurie put the question out to the members to vote on what we should make in honor of the anniversary. In the end, two recipes were selected: Cocoa-Buttermilk Birthday Cake and Tarte Tatin. We could make one or the other, or both! I decided to make Tarte Tatin since this is a recipe that I have wanted to try for some time. You can find the recipe on Laurie’s blog.

Tarte Tatin is exceptionally simple: just pastry, apples, sugar and butter. I used regular piecrust pastry, but you could also use puff pastry if you have that available. The recipe called for 8 apples, but apples in Washington state must be huge since I only used 4-1/2 apples in my 10-inch pan. They were all snugly nestled in the pan, so I wasn’t worried that I had used too few apples.

You start by melting lots of butter and then adding sugar, topping with apples, and then cooking until the butter/sugar mixture caramelizes. Dorie says that this will take about 15 minutes, but it took mine a good 30 minutes to turn a “deep caramel color.” I topped it with pastry and then baked it in the oven for 30 minutes.

It looked really great when it came out of the oven. It was really hot though and we didn’t really wait 10 minutes before eating, which is probably a good idea if you don’t want to burn your mouth. I really loved the simplicity of this tart. It is a lot sweeter than I expected, and next time I would serve it with vanilla ice cream. I have no idea if it keeps well since we basically ate it in one sitting. Just trying to maintain that post-Christmas sugar high! Overall, this is a simple dessert that looks very impressive. I’m excited to make this one again.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 312

13 comments:

slush said...

So glad you loved it. Tell tale sign is how much is left. And Im glad it helped maintain your post Xmas sugar high. Gotta keep that in check. ;) Thanks so much for baking along with me. xo

chocolatechic said...

I used puff pastry.

I bet it was wonderful with the pie crust.

Mary said...

That looks fantastic--great photo! I made the tarte too, and loved it:)

Susan said...

I am going to have to make this one, after reading post after post of fantastic reviews. Yours looks great!

Anonymous said...

Glad you enjoyed it so quickly! It WAS a fun dish to make, wasn't it? Looks wonderful - I'll have to try the pie crust - the tart dough was rather sweet.. or puff pastry too, so many choices!

mike
twd blog: web.me.com/mikejdunlap

carlyathomas2004 said...

Beautiful :) This was my first TWD post and I used the pie crust as well. Very tasty.

carlyathomas2004 said...

Beautiful :) This was my first TWD post and I used the pie crust as well. Very tasty.

Paula said...

Your pie crust looks really good. May try that next time.

thehappyheather said...

That photo made me hungry! :D

Leslie said...

What a beautiful tarte! I love the caramelization you got on your apples. We resisted eating the whole thing but it was very hard.

TeaLady said...

It was good, and easy. Yours looks perfect.

Unknown said...

The tart looks picture perfect. Nicely done.

Pamela said...

Wow, what a delicious looking photo of this wonderful dessert. It was great with ice cream and it started getting mushy for us on day 2. You did the right thing, eating it all at once! :o)