Tuesdays with Dorie: Tarte Tatin from Baking with Dorie

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe comes from Baking with Dorie. Tarte Tatin is one of my favourite French dishes so I couldn’t wait to make it, especially since Dorie had just recently written about it again in her newsletter. Basically this is pastry topped with caramel and apples, but it’s baked upside down so you have to flip it to serve.

Dorie says:

Tarte Tatin is a tart built to be turned over. You create a layer of caramel, arrange large pieces of apple over the caramel, cover with the dough, bake and then . . . ta-da: Turn it all upside down, lift off the pan, admire your work and settle in for a treat. Whether the apples are too deeply caramelized or not caramelized enough, it never matters: The tart is always delicious. If you get a case of nerves while making it, remember that the original tarte Tatin was itself a mistake — according to what might be a legend, the Tatin sisters, who ran a hotel near Paris, intended to make a classic apple tart but cooked the apples in the sugar for too long and, to save appearances, upended it to serve.

Many versions of the recipe make the tart in a skillet. But these days I’m doing things in new ways. For starters, I bake the tart in a cake pan, which is much easier to handle. The pan makes turning out the tart simple and safe. (Caramel is so hot and so sticky that safety is an issue.) And because I let the tart rest in the pan before unmolding it, the caramel has time to find its way deeper into the apples. Small changes, big differences.

I’ve made Tatin in an oven-safe skillet, cake pan and mini ramekins (for the version in In the French kitchen with kids) and have to say that a cake pan or ramekins are the way to go. Oven-safe skillets can be heavy and unwieldy and when you’re dealing with caramel, it’s best to make the other steps of the recipe easier if you can!

Dorie suggests Golden Delicious apples are the way to go, or Mutzu or Fuju – any apples really – except very soft ones like Macintosh – will work. Even Granny Smith (because the rest of the recipe is sweet, a tart apple will work). For the pastry, you can use pie dough or puff pastry, store-bought or homemade (like Dorie’s sweet tart dough or all butter crust). I’ve tended to use puff pastry in the past but (even for smaller versions of this recipe) pie dough is a bit sturdier.

For this iteration I used Dorie’s All-Butter Crust and OF COURSE I minified this – I made half the recipe for three smaller tarts (a generous serve for 1 person or a taster for 2 people). Though the recipe has a few steps, if you break them down and spread it out over the course of a day, nothing is too complicated. I made the pastry and rolled it out, popped it in the fridge then made the caramel. The caramel is poured directly into the dish/es you are using and can sit at room temp for a while.

I took my pastry out of the fridge when I started pre-heating the oven and while I peeled and sliced my apples. The most important thing is that you pack you apples in tightly to the dish so there are no gaps. By the time I had organised the apples, the pastry had a little give and was easy to trim and tuck around the apples.

These smaller tarts took about 40 minutes.

 I let them sit for a while before I flipped them out (they came out easily).

They were perfect – the right amount of caramel for the apples, the apples were perfectly soft and the pastry was not soggy!

Thanks, Dorie for the reminder that Tarte Tatin is a wonderful recipe for that “wow” factor – without too much work, really, especially when you take it step by step.

Get the recipe for Tarte Tatin on p 261 of Baking with Dorie or here.

Buy Baking with Dorie and join us baking through the book!

Buy Baking with Dorie on Amazon (this link should bring you to the Amazon store geographically closest to you). For free worldwide shipping, buy it on Blackwell’s. To support your local Indie bookstore, purchase on Bookshop.org.

Then join us over on Tuesdays with Dorie and bake your way through the book!

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Disclosure: I was provided with a copy of “Baking with Dorie” for review purposes. I was not asked to write about the book, nor am I being compensated for doing so. All opinions are 100% my own.

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