4 Levels of Tarts: Amateur to Food Scientist | Epicurious

hi i'm john and i'm a level one chef hi i'm gabrielle and i'm a level 2 chef hi i'm danielle alex and i've been a professional chef for 15 years and creator of diversity kitchen so today i'm going to be making a very simple fruit tart and it's filled with great berries so this tart recipe is a tribute to being from philly area there's such a thing called tomato pie so an interesting fact about my tart this tart uses orange blossom water which is very different from your typical tart but has great flavor i'm gonna make my tart crust i know what you're thinking you're a level two gab don't you have to make everything from scratch and the answer is no i don't like to over complicate things sometimes i just don't want to be in my kitchen making dough all day long and that's okay it's super easy you don't have to put it in plastic wrap you don't have to refrigerate it for hours and roll it out i don't want to spend hours in the kitchen so we are actually going to be using a pre-frozen puff pastry and we're going to jazz it up so that it is level two worthy so i'm gonna start off first by making my dough now that requires making the barrage first the barrage is the large pat of butter that i'm gonna put inside of my dough so i'm going to take my butter i'm going to throw it into my mixer add some flour i always start on low speed i want to just work out all of the kinks that are in this puff pastry it's nice and smooth i'm going to create a square with the butter and chill it this looks pretty good to me i am going to poke some holes in it with a fork just to kind of alleviate some of the um i actually don't know why i poke it with a fork now that our barrage is in the refrigerator chilling we're going to make our dough or also known as the de trump so first up we're going to put our dry ingredients right in this bowl flour here so i've got my flour in our mixer now i'm going to add a little bit of sugar and just a pinch of salt and now for our wet ingredients a cup of cold water oh the stick and a quarter of melted butter along with a pinch of almond extract and now i'm going to add a little bit of lemon juice the lemon juice or acid in here adds to the flakiness and tenderness of the dough and then with a fork i'm just gonna work it together i'm gonna mix it up first and then i'm gonna add more butter yeah you're right more butter so that looks pretty good to me i'm gonna go ahead now and transfer my pre-frozen puff pastry darf it's lord daario naharis but i call him darf and i'm going to just simply add my butter you'll always want to use soft butter you use cold butter you're going to have chunks in there i'm going to turn this on for about i'd say a four minutes or so you're gonna see that it's going to form a nice solid dough mask or you're gonna see that it's gonna form a nice ball so right now i'm going to elevate this otherwise very simple puff pastry into something that's a little bit more grandeur that's a little bit more of like a party stopper if you will now for the last step i'm going to put my hands in there i just want to make sure everything's fully incorporated and i'll show you it's one solid ball now i have to let this rest and chill in the refrigerator um so this and our barrage are better are the same temperature when we go to put it together we are going to be using the remaining puff pastry to create a braid that will then border the outside edge of the puff pastry so we've got our chilled dough here and you have to make sure you're working on a nicely floured surface so we're going to do the same thing that we did with the other piece of puff pastry where we're going to roll it out a little bit kind of do this rectangle shape so i'm going to cut three strips about a half inch in diameter and then i'm going to braid them together looks pretty good now that i have my butter in the middle i'm gonna take one end and i'm gonna fold it over and i'm gonna take the other end and fold it over this butter is like nicely tucked in bed right we don't want any of this butter squeezing out so i have my four braids now time to put these onto my heart base we are going to roll this out flat if this butter is getting too soft if it's if the dough is becoming like super malleable definitely put it in the refrigerator for a minute so that it can kind of firm up brush off any excess flour you know you just want to make sure that it's wrapped nice and tight so it doesn't create any kind of crust that also messes with the flakiness of the dough and then there it is our first turn of our puff pastry dough and we're gonna place this in the refrigerator to chill for at least two hours until it's nice and firm all right braid number one going on my first border i'm pressing i'm pressing the edges anything that's kind of excessive i'm folding over i'm tucking so now this is my last turn and i'm going to prep it for our pastry shell since i'm not using all of this i'm going to cut my piece roll it out to the desired thickness for my tart shell so as you can see i have a tart pen here so i'm going to take my hunk of dough and i do want to go right up to the edges of the tart pan and a nice technique that i like to use is i take my rolling pin i want to move quickly because i don't want our layers to get ruined and all this to kind of just slump as it cooks i'm going to go ahead and use a fork just to prick all over and the reason why we do pricks is just it allows the heat to flow through it nicely it's going to get evenly distributed take my rolling pin take this off and put it into the freezer as quickly as possible to chill it back down now let's put this in the oven and bake it off now we have the base for our puff pastry so there you have it and into the freezer it goes while we prepare our filling so the first thing to do is we're going to beat our whipped cream and i just have some beautiful heavy cream here and if you've ever made whipped cream before it's super simple since this is our pistachio tart i'm gonna place my pistachios my sugar and i'm gonna place a very interesting ingredient bread right and i like to use pandame which is pretty much a basic white bread i make sure i remove all the crust and it's going to take a few minutes but you just work it around all right and there we have whipped cream so now it's time to make my pesto sauce base layer for this heirloom tomato tart i want a pretty good amount of the oil that the tomatoes are preserved in as well as like a decent amount of the tomatoes themselves you know i saw somewhere that someone said that sun-dried tomatoes weren't cool anymore we're gonna use them even if they are out of style here we have our pistachio sugar and flour in here and it's nice you know it's kind of like a coarse sand and i'm gonna add my butter and then i'm gonna add my orange blossom water so i'm gonna measure out about a tablespoon of course if you love the flavor feel free to add a little more so for my tart filling i'm doing a mix of two soft cheeses it's perfect for dessert so i really like to use a blend of cream cheese and mascarpone cheese a little honey garlic two cloves peel them throw them in so i have just kind of a nice little handful of basil i'm gonna throw that straight in and then last but not least i'm just going to put a little bit of salt in just gonna do half a brick of packed cream cheese and now i'm just gonna beat these together until they're nice and smooth [Applause] [Music] it's quite blended but everything is more or less kind of chopped finely and so it's good to go as a spread so these two are really nice and mixed now if you look at it here you have it it's nice and smooth i'm gonna add the rest of my ingredients so here i have half a cup of confectionery sugar that's gonna really sweeten this up as you can tell this is not a tart for the calorie counters but when i tell you it's worth it and it's delicious it is so now for the most important part of this recipe the heirloom tomatoes oh my gosh they're so pretty i love them i love them all but we're gonna eat them i'm gonna do the juice of half a lemon i know lemon little weird but this is a tart so this will add a little tartness i wonder if that's where the word tart came from i don't know but maybe you know a nice thick slice so whatever that feels like to you and then we're just gonna add a little bit of almond extract and i think it complements our crust nicely and then we're just gonna beat it so that there's no lumps at all and everything is combined tomatoes are fruit we do know that we have confirmed that that is one of those things that i remember when you learned as a kid you're like a tomato is not a fruit i still don't know why tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable this is looking great i think this is ready for our whipped cream our shell is nice and hard i'm gonna take my filling and place it right here in the dough so i'm gonna take my sun-dried tomato pesto spread and i'm gonna quite literally just spread it all over the base of this puff pastry alrighty so look at that isn't that beautiful here we have our filling and our tart dough and now i'm just going to place it in the freezer for a few minutes just to chill it down the last step with the filling is just to fold in our whipped cream got my pink spatula which you know i love so i have my tomatoes so now i'm gonna go ahead and just kind of start to piece this together and be a little bit artistic it's all incorporated no lumps it looks like a beautiful little puzzle piece yeah it's time to go into the oven it's always best to preheat my oven first a unique thing i do with this is i make sure i get a pizza stone so i'm gonna place this on the lower third rack of my oven now that everything's chilled i place it on a cookie sheet and this cookie sheet will go directly onto our pizza stone so i'm going to pop this tart in the oven for about 18 minutes at 400 degrees and we'll be able to watch the puff pastry rise [Music] my tart has been in the oven for about 20-25 minutes this is looking great it's a nice golden color all right here's our beautiful tart it's been in the oven for 45 minutes at 375 degrees so i think the word that comes to mind when i look at this is like rustic and the only way to make that even better and to enhance it is to go ahead and add my final touches and my final toppings now for our topping we're going to make a whipped cream fresh i'm going to take my creme fraiche and place it in a bowl and then i'm going to give it a nice little whipping so creme fraiche is kind of like you could call it like the french version of sour cream you can keep it cold in the refrigerator just set it aside but i'm ready for a slice so i'm going to put this aside and grab our tart so now i'm going to take my filling and spread it all over our beautiful pie crust so first things first i'm just gonna go right in with my time not chopping anything it's just fresh thyme and that's it for time we plenty time but we don't we don't need that much time time jokes they never get old so now for my favorite part the fruit i'm a designer by trade no i'm not i'm a creative at heart so i like to get fun with the design there's a lot of art to bake goods i don't want the focus of this tart to be the cheese this isn't a pizza but i wanted to add a little bit of the saltiness and some of that sourness that comes from the pecorino romano so i'm just going to go ahead and give it a really light dusting for the next concentric circle blackberries i'm just realizing it's a little red white and blue i did not plan for the americana now next big is my raspberries this is gonna be another ring of red some red chili flakes for just a little bit of a kick and then last but not least our blueberries which i got a lot of them i'm gonna have more to eat my olive oil just to really bring it all home now that i have my berries fully arranged on my tart the next and the last step is just to add a simple glaze i just use a very simple apricot preserves we're just going to go ahead with our pastry brush and my honey a really nice local honey especially in the summertime brush the fruit with a little bit of glaze and now it really feels like we're painting so this isn't more of an art project i don't know what is and last but truly not least my basil so i'm going to introduce you to my basil gnome he's really picky but i like to ask him just for permission so basil gnome are we good we're good so i'm going to just rip these in half and sprinkle them over and here's my fruit tart and this is my heirloom tomato tart and here you have it my pistachio orange blossom tart now time for the best part the eating all right here we go nice big bite oh my god oh my god it came out exactly i was i wanted the feeling really for me is the best part i mean i love my berries but the filling is just so light i think this is job well done i'm not saying it's like pizza but i would take this any day over pizza there's like a sweetness that comes from the honey but it doesn't taste like honey if you want to be the most popular person at a summer party you should probably make this honestly this turned out perfect i'd say making my own dough is definitely worth the work when you really master that flaky crust there's nothing like it and if you love pistachios this is definitely your tart the most distinctive elements of a tart are its shell and filling let's take a look at the key differences between each of our chef's tarts john made a simple and relatively quick tart shell john used butter which is flavorful and makes a tender crust for his tart butter is a water and oil emulsion which means it's got tiny pockets of water dispersed in fat in fact most butters are between 15 and 20 percent water gabrielle used commercial store-bought puff pastry for her tart shell there's usually no butter in the frozen puff pastry that you buy in the grocery store instead they use tropical oils like palm kernel oil or hydrogenated soy or cottonseed oils these types of fats have the advantage of being more flexible and formible than butter however they don't have the flavor or browning qualities that butter brings danielle made a traditional laminated puff pastry pastry lamination means that butter and dough are formed by a process of rolling folding and turning her first step was to make a barrage she mixed a small amount of flour and lots of softened butter together and then chilled it when it's very cold butter can actually fracture and crumble to prevent this danielle added some flour in this step which made the butter more elastic when it's very cold which is essential when it comes to baking puff pastry next danielle made the dough trump which is combining flour water a bit of sugar to assist with browning and salt danielle also added some lemon juice to her to trump the acid allows the small amount of gluten developed to become more flexible and stretchy she placed the barrage onto the detromp took the two short ends of the rectangle that she made and brought them together to meet in the middle she then rolled it with a tapered rolling pin and then made a tri-fold this is considered to be one turn you have to kind of repeat this process for about two to three times and sometimes you do it and you let it rest for two hours or longer and then you lose track how many times have i done this right take a finger lightly press right there and that shows you i've done this once or you just wrap it in plastic wrap and you put a note on there one two three four she did three turns total which makes many layers of cold dough and cold butter making this ultra flaky once it's baked john whipped heavy cream he also whipped muscarpone cheese with cream cheese mascarpone is a soft spreadable unripened cheese made by thermal acidic coagulation of dairy cream gabrielle made a savory tart that started with a filling of blended sun-dried tomatoes sun drying is a slow method of dehydrating tomatoes which allows flavors to concentrate and retains volatile flavor compounds the result is a shiny deep red rich slightly tangy tomato with 12 to 24 moisture reduction danielle made a pistachio filling pistachios are high in protein and sugar compared to other nuts so they're naturally sweet they get their beautiful green color from chlorophyll the bread is a neutral filler that takes up more volume while making the filling less dense the bread actually acts as a binder orange blossom water has a fruity and floral flavor it's been used in confections and pastries in northern africa the middle east and spain since the 6th century notice she only added a tablespoon because a little goes a long way john prebaked his simple and delicious tart crust when you blind bake which means you bake a crust that is not filled it's important to take a fork and prick the bottom so that the steam can escape and you won't end up with an overly blistered crust gabrielle waited to bake her tart until it was filled danielle made sure that her filled tart was very cold prior to baking at 375 degrees fahrenheit when it was baked steam formed from the butter melting and starches gelatinized when the butter melted it left some space where water evaporated and flakes formed from the layering next time you're in the mood to make a tart remember you can go sweet savory simple or sophisticated we hope you'll use some of the tips from our three great chefs

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 520,899

Keywords: 4 levels, epicurious 4 levels, 4 levels epicurious, epi 4 levels, tart recipe, bake a tart, how to bake a tart, expert tart, professional tart, tart pastry, tart dessert, professional tart recipe, easy tart recipe, epicurious tart, tarts, fruit tart, fruit tarts, savory tart, savory tart recipe, tomato tart, danielle alex, pistachio tart, pistachio dessert, homemade fruit tart, homemade tart, gabrielle chappel, 4 levels of tarts, tart, epicurious

Id: OucpyMKFMls

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020