The tarte tatin is a typical French pastry pie, a unique goodness, created by mistake by the Tatin Sisters, two French pastry chefs in the early 1900s. According to tradition, it is a sort of apple pie made with rennet apples. It is a crunchy dessert prepared with a base of caramelised apples with sugar and butter and covered with shortcrust pastry, finally turned upside down after cooking in the oven!
Ingredients
Preparation: 40 minutes Cooking: 30 minutes
For the base:
- 125 g flour
- 20 g sugar
- 3 g salt
- 70 g butter in chunks
- 20 g lard (or just 90 total butter)
- 30 g very cold water
- 15 g very cold vodka
- 10 g brown sugar
- 1 egg
For the filling:
- 3 apples
- 80 g sugar
For the topping:
- grains of half a pomegranate
- 150 ml whipped cream
- a pinch of ground cinnamon
Preparation methodology
Prepare the basic dough: in a mixer with blades – if you have them – put flour, salt, butter and lard if you will be using it. Work quickly with the blades at maximum to crumble the mixture. If you don’t have a mixer, you’ll do this in a bowl by working the mixture with your fingertips and crumbling it between your palms. Don’t work the mixture too hard; if there are pieces of butter left over, it will be fine; the important thing is not to heat the mixture. Add the sugar, ice water and vodka, knead quickly and wrap the dough in cling film, leaving it to rest for two or three hours in the fridge, or preferably overnight.
Put the sugar in the pan and heat over a medium flame, obtaining a brown caramel: do not use a spoon to stir the sugar, just move the pan using an oven glove.
Let it cool down and in the meantime peel and core, the apples cut them into eight segments each. Arrange the apple slices tightly together on top of the caramel, draw a radial pattern and fill the centre: cut any leftovers thinner and place them on top of the slices to create volume – which will then be lost during cooking.
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Take the dough from the fridge and, using a rolling pin and a little flour sprinkled on the work surface, roll out the base to make an 18 cm disc about 5-6 mm thick: place it on the apples, trying to tuck the edges down, make a hole and bake for about 25-30 minutes, continuing if you see that the “lid” of dough is not golden brown.
At the end of the cooking time, continue for another two minutes with the oven door slightly open, so that the moisture from the liquid in the apples evaporates.
Remove from the oven and leave to cool for about 15 minutes, take the serving dish and turn the Tarte Tatin from the mould onto the dish – watch out for hot caramel spillage!
Serve just warm or let cool completely at room temperature then, enrich the surface with pomegranate seeds and some semi-whipped cream with a pinch of cinnamon, if you like.
Preparation tips:
Incorporating a high percentage of butter and an alcoholic beverage such as vodka into the liquids of the dough will give you a crisper base. Alternatively, if you don’t want to make the base by hand, use ready-made puff pastry.
Alice Parretta
Some encounters change your life, and that with patisserie changed mine.
Born and raised in Florence, after devoting her years of study to very different paths in the fields of psychology and sport, she came across ovens and cookers by chance and discovered her true passion: patisserie!
After initial self-taught training, she attended basic courses in some Florentine schools and then graduated from the Italian Academy of Chefs in Bologna, in the patisserie sector.
She deeply loves books, cats, and carbohydrates.
“Il Dolce Di Alice” is the name of my blog and my social profiles where I advertise my activity as a home patisserie chef and as a first-level trainer that I carry out in Florence.
