Tarte Tatin IV: Reproducibility

 

~10'' saucepan

4 Golden Delicious apples

1/2 cup honey

2/3 stick butter

1 tsp lemon juice

pastry dough enough to cover the ~10'' pan rolled

Preheat oven to 375 F.  On low heat, melt butter in saucepan.  Fill a large bowl about half way with water, and pour in lemon juice.  Peel, core, and quarter apples, placing them in lemon water.  When butter is melted, remove pan from heat and stir in honey, mixing thoroughly (a rubber spatula works to both stir and scrape honey out of a measuring cup).  Shaking off excess water, arrange apple quarters radially, exteriors up, in pan.  (Arranging the outside edge first is easier.)  Roll out pastry into a roughly round shape large enough to completely cover pan.  On high heat bring honey-butter to a boil.  Boil for 3 minutes.  Flip apple quarters. Boil for another 4 minutes, stirring apple quarters around but not messing up their arrangement (pushing the outside edge to spin it and moving the pan in a horizontal, circular motion are two ways to do this).  Remove from heat.  Move the rolled out pastry dough using rolling pin, and place evenly on top of pan.  Trim excess if there is a lot of it.  Using a utensil to avoid burning hands, gently tuck the edges down between apples and the edge of the pan.  Gently press the top into a relatively even shape.  Bake for ~30 minutes at 375 F.  Cool for ten minutes.  Run a knife along the inside edge of the pan.  Using potholders, turn out onto a plate.  Cool for another twenty minutes.

(No I'm not posting another pastry dough recipe.)

Tarte Tatin III: Golden, Delicious, Boring

This time I used Golden Delicious apples.

Look, no applesauce!

4 apples, 6 minutes caramelizing, all-purpose flour.

Having put together a satisfactory result (I've replicated the more blonde photos that appear if you search for "Tarte Tatin" on Google Images), what would be the purpose of writing another recipe?  The trail-and-error experimentation I went through to arrive at this tasty yet now boring tart was not because of a dearth of good recipes, but rather because I had to get to know the recipe.  Apparently getting to know a recipe, for me, involves significant variations that are clearly not called for in the recipe: different fruit, sugar, flour, and proportions. (If stupidity is doing the same thing and expecting different result, what is doing something different and expecting the same result?)  It was through this daft variation that the necessities of the recipe revealed themselves.  Pears instead of apples and honey instead of sugar are fine.  But whole wheat pastry flour makes more finicky dough than all-purpose flour, the type of apples is dramatically important where consistency is concerned, and caramelization is a highly sensitive process that if you're niggly about burnt spots requires stirring, flipping, and paranoia about how long to leave the pan on high heat.  And so several seemingly unimportant details, glossed over by most recipes, become solidified into details that must happen.  If knowledge is as I have just described it, a collection of immobile things, perhaps this is why I am not at all motivated to write another recipe now that I think I know what I'm doing where this tart is concerned.  The previous recipe was in pursuit, and we've all heard those sayings about how it's all in the chase.  It was a recipe of what I imagined should be done, an imaginative fiction of sorts.  This recipe that I feel I should but don't want to write would be a history.  Although I would make some minor changes: I would caramelize it for just a little longer.  I would make sure there isn't a gap in the arrangement of apple slices.  I would use a little less water in the dough (the crust was a bit tough).  I suppose the point of writing the recipe down would be as an elaborate mimetic.  Months or years from now I will have forgotten about all this, and the recipe should allow me to make the same tart again, even though without the recipe I won't remember how.

Well, I still have one more round of dough in the fridge.  I'll write the recipe after I make one more tart.

Tarte Tatin II: Applesauce

The bits that were too burnt are on that little plate in the background.

 I followed the recipe I wrote last time, but with apples instead of pears.  But they were Granny Smith apples, and so the result is very thick, sweetened, somewhat caramelized applesauce on top of pastry.  It doesn't taste bad, in fact it tastes very good, but the texture is not at all what I was hoping for.  Apparently I should be using a different kind of apple, one that doesn't disintegrate when baked.

Other problems included a hunk of pie dough very irritable from being left in the fridge for a few days.  Like a bad case of athlete's foot, it cracked over and over when rolled out, and it fell apart being gently tucked into the pan.  Its fragility was probably in part due to the whole wheat pastry flour.

Some parts of the top (the bottom) were virtually charcoal, which I remedied by just scraping them off.  But maybe I should move the apples around in the pan while they're cooking in the boiling caramel.

Finally, I think I liked the less fruit, more pastry of last time.