Loubet and Breton baker Richard Bertinet use puff pastry, Koffmann and the Master Chefs rich, sweet pâte sucrée, and Michel Roux calls for something he calls “flan pastry”, which contains slightly less butter than a classic shortcrust, and adds water for a crisper texture. Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book gives an Alsatian recipe with a brioche dough base that sounds intriguing, but sadly lies outside my remit here. (Rest assured we’ll make up the missing butter elsewhere.) The pastry
Elegant is what we’re after here, so slim slices win the day.Ī 1984 compilation of recipes from the Master Chefs of France includes a recipe from the north for a tart a l’coloche which sautes the fruit in butter before adding it to the tart, making it hard to arrange on top (hot!) without adding much to its flavour. This is, of course, utterly delicious, but creates a rather more rustic result: “It looks more like I made that one,” observes my tester. Pierre Koffmann keeps his apples in larger chunks in the recipe for tarte aux pommes et à la crème de lait in his nostalgic book, Memories of Gascony, and then half-cooks them in caramel, somewhat like a tatin. (I also think 2mm slices have a tendency to become leathery: 3-4mm give juicier results.) Most recipes also call for the apples to be peeled, cored and very finely sliced – 2mm is the usual instruction – but, in fact, I rather like the look of the peel on the finished dish, so – although it would horrify any fussy French patissier – I wouldn’t bother with the first step. Look for dryish, intensely flavoured varieties, like the aforementioned cox, or russet, early windsor or laxton’s fortune. There are a few caveats, though: cooking apples won’t work, because you need the fruit to hold its shape when heated, and anything too mild (golden delicious, I’m looking at you) will be similarly underwhelming on a tart. That said, there’s a reason almost all the recipes I try call for “crisp eating” apples, as Julia Child puts it – cox’s orange pippins are the most frequently mentioned, though in France the closely related reinette is the standard choice, and if you find any, snap them up: the golden reinette was apparently very popular here in the 18th and 19th centuries, but is, in my experience, rarely seen today.
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