Claire Saffitz Makes Meyer Lemon Tart | Dessert Person

apparently my parents taught my older sister to say enchante when she met people which is kind of bizarre and hilarious okay hey everyone i'm claire welcome to my home kitchen today i'm showing you a recipe from dessert person and this is a recipe that is great for the dead of winter it is a bright happy citrusy recipe my meyer lemon tart it's sour but sweet and you have a layer of jam it's so pretty to look at so um i love eating it i love making it i'm excited to show you [Music] person i love lemon desserts love love love i think lemons are like a miracle of nature and i use them constantly like i always always always have lemons in my kitchen they add the most sort of piercing brightness to anything and so this is something i've been making for like decades and i and i love it and meyer lemons are a breed of lemon they're very popular they're very common in california in fact my cousin sent me lemons from his tree he lives in long beach california thank you jordan and they have they're a little milder than your standard conventional lemon but they have this incredible floral like almost spicy flavor and to me when i see meyer lemons in the store it means that like it's the start of winter but they make me a little less sad about winter because they are such a special ingredient and i love them i mean this recipe is a great one to demo because yes we're going to assemble the tart but i'm going to go through the process of making curd which is itself a very very versatile pastry component and you can like spread it on scones or toast you can put it in a lemon tart you can like eat it with ice cream there's just so much you can do with it so it's a great great pastry component to familiarize yourself with so for the tart itself you need a nine inch removable bottom tart pan then a saucepan and a whisk and then for the crust i'll show you how to make that sweet taco you need a food processor then i have four large egg yolks plus a whole egg six tablespoons unsalted butter two thirds of a cup sugar half a cup yogurt third of a cup jam i'm using raspberry you can use any flavor kosher salt and then meyer lemons and we're gonna use the juice and the zest [Music] before we assemble the tart we have to make the sweet tart dough and this is an all-purpose tart dough that you could use as the base for like any tart really and it's a cousin of pie dough but it has a much finer texture it's not flaky um and it comes together very quickly very simple ingredients one yolk powdered sugar little almond flour butter cut into half inch pieces cup all-purpose flour half a teaspoon kosher salt and half a teaspoon vanilla extract i add almond flour which i toast because i want to give a little extra flavor and texture to the dough um i don't want to just be like the vehicle for the tart filling i want it to taste good on its own so the first step that i'm going to do is toast the almond flour if you have a nut allergy or you want to keep this nut free for any reason you could substitute all-purpose flour for the almond flour so just increase the all-purpose flour by a third of a cup and omit the almond flour entirely this is going to go in a 350 oven you could put this in like a toaster oven but do keep a careful eye on it because something this fine will burn easily so i'm going to add all my other ingredients except for the egg and vanilla and butter which really just means i'm putting the powdered sugar flour and kosher salt in the food processor i'm using one yolk as sort of a like a binding agent for the dough and that helps to keep it together keep it from kind of crumbling and it just makes a firmer set when you bake it so i like having a little yolk in there and to this i'm going to add my vanilla extract a half of a teaspoon and then two teaspoons water i initially made this recipe without any water and the dough was so tender because the flour and it like you only produce gluten in the presence of water and without any water you don't get any gluten and the dough was so tender it wouldn't even support a filling not a lot okay set that aside oh my god four teaspoons cold water who knew it was four teaspoons this has been happening a lot but actually i looked at the recipe and it's four teaspoons i'm adding two more that seems like a lot but i made this a million times by the book so i'm going to trust myself smells like toasted almonds so i know almond flour is done pull that out usually like the top layer gets toasted in the oven so i spread it out pretty thin you don't want to let it get very dark otherwise it starts to taste a tiny bit bitter but this just needs to cool for a few minutes and then i'll throw it in the food processor with the other dry ingredients so this is a stick of butter that i cut into half inch cubes make sure it's cold and unlike pie dough we don't want big discreet pieces of butter to be left in the dough we want to sort of fully work it into the flour mixture but if you want to do it by hand go ahead and have all the ingredients in a bowl add the butter and just work it in with your fingertips but in the food processor just give it a few pulses so i don't want to make a dough yet i haven't added the egg and the other liquids but i want to create something that almost looks like a coarse cornmeal so it's not fully broken down go ahead and pour in your liquid and now all i want to do is pulse this until i have a dough that comes together around the blade it's the wrong way and this is my sweet tart dough i recommend chilling this for at least an hour let the butter fully harden again and then you're good to go did i talk about how i love and hate my food processor i have a love-hate relationship with my food processor i get my food processor out for very few things and i have made this tart dough by hand just because i didn't even want to get it out but i have to say once it's out it really is so convenient i just hate cleaning it hi maya okay once you have everything on the plastic i use the edges of the plastic to press it down and you can press this into any shape you want i thin it out because then it chills down faster and i like to form it into a square so then i tried to press out any big air pockets now if you look at the texture of this dough you can see it's very very uniform i don't see any bits of butter what this ends up being a texture that rather than flaky you get something that's a little bit more like shortbread and cookie like but that makes a sturdy base for a tart filling so this goes into the fridge and i'm going to grab one that i made yesterday this is what it looks like when it's had a chance to chill so it's gone totally solid that butter has hardened again and it's had a nice long rest so unwrap your dough having a hard time with this plastic now a general principle that i go by is that like about half the dough goes around the sides and about half goes into the bottom it's a slightly you need slightly more for the bottom of the pan so this piece is for the sides this piece is for the bottom and basically i cut the smaller half of the dough into like six pieces and this part does not have to be exact and this part's simple you just press it all the way around the inner perimeter of the pan and into the sides and this to me is the quickest easiest way of getting a ring of dough perfectly even around the sides now i have a little bit left over if there's any little areas where like the two pieces meet i can press a little more dough into those areas and you can see it's not coming all the way at the sides don't worry it will okay so now i'm going to take the other slightly larger half of the dough and do the same thing but this time press those strips into the bottom of the pan so this is what we have now i can actually start to press it into the pan with my fingers another very useful tool that i recommend is a straight sided glass or measuring cup so i have a measuring cup here so this is another good tool for pressing and thinning out the dough that's not it's not going to warm the dough like your hands do but for now i'm going to start with just my fingertips and i'm thinning it out making sure that all the pieces are fusing together and then pushing it into any areas that are that are bare and then when i get to the edge where the sides start i'm being really careful to make sure i'm pressing the dough firmly into that piece of dough along the side so that it fuses now that i have an even layer of dough across the bottom i'm going to go in with the sides of my measuring cup and press the dough into the fluted edge and i want to press it so that the dough rises to just above the top of the pan okay so that looks good and before we bake this just to prevent any further shrinking in the oven and to make sure the dough really holds its shape i pop it in the freezer for like five minutes if i can find a space for it yeah i got a spot oh god oh what hold on okay all right five minutes that's all i need in the meantime so i guess i should say we're gonna par-bake this crust meaning the crust gets baked without any filling in it and then we pour the filling in and bake it again so to do that i want to bake it on a baking sheet which is easy for removal in and out of the oven and my oven's on 350. what do we say it's been five to ten and because the dough is in a metal pan and it's in a very thin layer it doesn't take very long for it to become totally solid so now i'm taking i have a little paring knife here and i want to shave off any excess tart dough do you deep fry the shavings no i'm actually going to hold on to the shavings don't throw them out because it's very useful to have a bit of extra dough which i can use to patch the tart crust if any cracks appear during baking so now we have our tart shell which looks really really beautiful it's filling the tart pan and the layer of dough across the bottom is nice and even i'm going to press a piece of foil into the surface of the crust not the sides but i'm not going to weight it so this is a trick that i picked up from the chez panisse desserts cookbook by lindsey shears pastry chef a famous pastry chef and in her tart dough recipe she uses this technique which is basically to prevent the sides from slumping this step helps to keep that definition but i don't even have to weight it down just the action of having the foil pressed into the dough will keep the sides supported so you can see i've left the foil sticking up and it didn't wrap it up over and around this exposed edge of the crust and that's because i want to be able to see how well it's browning i'm going to par bake this so after about 15 or 20 minutes i'm going to take the foil off and then bake it a little bit longer just so the bottom has a chance to set so again 350 center rack of the oven 15 to 20 minutes is enough time to put together the curd so i'm going to show you how to make that lemon curd is like one of my all-time favorite things to make [Music] lemon curd is a very simple preparation it is a sweetened fruit juice that is set with eggs and butter is stirred in until it's thick and creamy and delicious i'm building everything in the saucepan off the heat putting my sugar in there and then i'm going to take the zest from two meyer lemons and finely grated into the sugar you could make this with regular lemons just follow the instructions in the book for making standard lemon curd which is the base recipe and then just use that in in the instructions it will turn out great i have all the zest in here with the sugar and i'm also going to add the salt a half teaspoon so this is a step i often do when i'm baking with lemons i am massaging the zest with my fingertips into the sugar and sugar crystals have sharp edges and those crystals scrape into the zest and release all of these fragrant oils that are in the zest and i can smell it already it's very very intense so you want to keep doing this until the mixture is kind of orange and the zest is distributed and because of the moisture it'll kind of look like wet sand and i want three quarters of a cup of fresh juice i have a teeny tiny cut on my left pointer finger this part's brutal what's the story i don't know you ever like find cuts on yourself when you like wash your hands and realize like i don't even know when that happened i'm gonna check on the crust maya you are gonna have to move that is not a good place for you i gotta open the oven come on come on nope nope there you go there you go all right this looks good i think i'm ready to take the foil off remove it slowly so that you don't disturb the surface of the crust underneath this looks beautiful i'm going to bake it a few minutes longer so that i get a little bit of browning on the bottom set my timer for i don't even remember what it says i'll i'll all know when it's done let's get back to this okay always save everything but i i usually like hold on to partially squeezed out lemon so i can add it make spot water spa water you know like you add some mint you add some lemons and you make spot water the few times i've been to a spa i'm that person eating all the fruit out of the fruit basket and drinking all the spa water because i'm trying to get my money worth my money's worth let's make some lemon curd to my mixture of lemon zest and sugar and salt i'm adding all my eggs and i am going to vigorously whisk this make sure that you're getting the whisk into those edges and that there's no unincorporated sugar stuck in there [Music] i'm going to add the juice whisk that in really well and now we're going to cook this so i'm doing over medium to bring the temperature up a little bit and the most important thing with lemon curd is do not stop whisking you are going to be sitting here next to the stove just doing this the whole time oh god okay [Music] i can see that this is getting close because i have a thick mixture that is holding like the whisk leaves a slight trail 170. okay there's something called nap or like napaj in french which means like coating it also means like um glaze but basically it will cling to the back of a spoon and there's no running or anything like that that is perfect doneness for curd so now that we have this beautiful cooked lemon curd i am going to whisk in my butter i'm adding it one piece at a time and then once you see the piece disappear you can add the next and whisk constantly the last thing is to add a little bit of vanilla i'm adding this at the end because i don't want to cook the vanilla flavor i want it to be really fresh so i'm putting this into a quart container grab a little piece of plastic wrap and now i want to press this plastic directly onto the surface of the curd and that's because custards like this have a tendency to form a skin or like a dried out little layer on top and this prevents that from happening so go ahead and press that directly on the surface then cover it and chill it this will take several hours to get cold so in the case of the tart you can make this well ahead of time you can make it three four days ahead and just leave it in your fridge which is what i've done oh for people that aren't expecting something sour like you might wince a little bit testing toasting one two three this is my fifth tasting 15th tasting a quinceanera if you will oh my lemon tart [Music] how do you like the flavor oh no it gets me i think it's cool yeah all right well you'd be the judge all right i guess i'll eat it but i still think it's well balanced and also it's the kind of thing where if you wanted to put a little whipped cream on top that would be the perfect thing to balance it out [Music] this is the point at which you would probably want to patch the crust if you see visible cracks and like i'm smearing it into the so it blends into the crust there's a little tiny crack right here again if you didn't reserve any dough because you forgot which happens to me sometimes make a soft dough out of just flour and water you're not like gonna taste it this is just purely structural so this is a third of a cup of jam and this is enough to create a thin layer across the bottom of the nine inch tart so scrape that in all right this has to go into the oven so i bake just the jam inside the chart shell and it basically like sets the jam it removes some of the water and creates this impermeable layer so that the liquid the the moisture in the curd doesn't soften and sog out the bottom crust it only takes like five to seven minutes this is a curd i made several days ago lemon cure lasts an extremely long time like weeks in your fridge because it's so acidic it doesn't really spoil and basically what happens is we bake this again and cook the eggs even more and i we get something that sets so much that it's sliceable and really holds its shape then a half a cup of yogurt so here is you can see that it liquefied a bit as i stirred and also incorporated the yogurt and now this is ready to go and be poured into my tart shell as soon as the jam is set which should be any minute now i can see that this is kind of subtle but it's a little bit more matte than when it went in so that's what i'm looking for that's how i know it's set and i might not need all the curt there could be a little tiny bit left over in which case i don't think anyone's going to mind having a little bit of lemon curd to snack on you do want to try to fill it all the way to the top if you can which is another reason why it's nice to have a very even crust all the way around i'm smoothing with count spatula to make a nice surface and i'm also mixing in those little clumps of yogurt oh that's good you can anytime you're filling a tart or a pie with like a liquid custard filling you can give it a couple of taps on the counter pop any air bubbles now i lick this and i have to get rid of it but i think i actually have oh pop pop oh i think it's a piece of zest all right but i'm not going to drive myself crazy all right now back into the oven for 20 to 33 minutes which is kind of random but basically i'm looking at right around a half an hour in the oven but you want to be careful about not overcooking it so we'll talk about how do you know it's done i'm looking for a wobble but not a ripple okay uh this is a new zone of my kitchen which is sitting on my trash can i should it's really kind of nice i should say that there's no color on the surface of the curt i'm not browning it i just want it to be set this looks so beautiful you can see there's like a little bit of rise around the very edge of the curd so that egg has souffled and when i do this see how the whole thing wobbles but i'm not getting like little liquidy ripples so this needs to cool and then i'm going to chill it because we want to cut this cold i want the butter and the curd to set and we'll get a really clean perfect point slice okay i i think it's been like an hour and a half to two hours since i put the tart in the fridge it could really go longer but we have other things to do today so i'm going to cut it so now before i serve it in order to cut it i need to take off the outer ring so i need to unmold it and here is a little trick for unmolding something with a removable bottom so i just rest the tart the bowl and let the ring fall away easy stick it back on here oh see how it's quivering it's not quite set yet but it looks beautiful i just love the stripe of jam at the bottom it's so pretty i just think that this is such a perfect dessert it's tart and a little bit bracing but it's so well balanced by all the creamy ingredients the butter and the yogurt which adds like a wonderful body to it and then you get a little surprise from the jam on the bottom and i even love the texture of the little bits of zest and the seeds from the raspberry jam and then you have this wonderful like sandy textured still crisp crust on the bottom it is just so refreshing and just kind of like brings a smile to my face i also just think that something with citrus like this is a natural remedy for seasonal affective disorder because you don't think that you would eat something so bright and fresh tasting in the dead of winter but you can if you make this tart mario lemon helps lift your mood thank you for watching i hope you try this recipe like and subscribe and stay tuned we'll have more dessert person content for you soon he's a little mouth breather kitty because he has a upper respiratory problem and he's blind [Music] [Music]

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 482,798

Rating: 4.9626541 out of 5

Keywords: Lemon Tart Recipe, How To Make Lemon Tart, Easy Lemon Tart Recipe, Baking, Bon Appetit, Lemon Tart, dessert, claire saffitz dessert person, dessert recipes, dessert recipe, Claire Saffitz Makes Meyer Lemon Tart, Claire Makes, meyer lemon, Meyer Lemon Recipes, Sweet Tart Dough, Lemon Curd, lemon curd tart, Lemon Dessert, Tart, Tart Recipe, Claire Saffitz, Sweet Pastry Crust, Pastry Crust, Tart Crust, Sweet Pastry Crust Recipe, How To Make Pastry Crust, Claire Lemon Tart

Id: Fowgc-J4kCc

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jsmeeker]

I always like it when Claire is surprised about her own recipes. What's in them, the amounts of things, etc.

[u/madeindavid]

Vivaldi forever! Good choice Vinny!

[u/brr10534]

I just made this two days ago and my god is it delicious. I ate a quarter of it for breakfast yesterday

[u/Haunting_Way_816]

I should have guessed from the Meyer lemon/orange mix up last episode that this would be coming. This recipe is one of my most recent bakes and I loooove it!

Also Claire nudging Maya with her foot has big "Miette" energy. If you know you know.

[u/OrliniBabyPasta]

This vid really helped me understand tart dough. I've always thought of tarts as pie-like, but when she talked about how it needs to be sturdy enough to support the filling and how it's more like a cookie or shortbread than a pie dough, I felt like I finally "got" what a tart is supposed to be. Not sure if that makes sense.

[u/ks1645]

~spa water~

[u/districtly]

i made this a few months ago! tasty and tart, but the flavor of the jam was buried. if i make it again i’ll double the amount of jam

[u/madeindavid]

I'm here for my Claire fix.

[u/62be62bee]

Just bought the book! This looks so yummy!