Patisserie 1: Pâte Sablée/Orange cream tart/Apple upside down tart

 I've recently found myself with a surplus of time due to some unforeseen circumstances, so I've decided to spend the next few months working on improving my baking skills in a quantifiable manner. As a fan of fancy looking cakes and entremets, I was drawn towards the beautiful works in Modern French Pastry by Cheryl Wakerhauser, but I had no doubt in my mind that this would be a different beast than all my previous baking. 

I've been baking what I roughly categorize as "American Pastry" for the last decade or so: quick breads like banana bread or zucchini bread, flaky biscuits, savory scones, large chewy cookies, muffins, and pies. I started with box mixes (in the interest of not turning this into a "my life story" type of blog, I can provide details of my journey upon request) and have gradually improved to the point where a Pulitzer Prize winner once told me, "this pie crust is like crack." It's one of my proudest cooking moments. 

My first attempt at a NY style cheesecake, which came out perfect even without a bain-marie

 

 

First attempt at chocolate babka, where I threw in some cacao nibs.

 I figure if you're already here on my blog, you're down to see me flex my talent at baking, where somehow I've accumulated enough XP through sheer quantity of the procrastibaking I did in college that I can make pretty good things the first time around.

But I have a terrible habit.

I just wing it. Every time. 

I have a few go-to recipes, like for pie crust or challah or seeded brown soda bread, that I use over and over. But I settled upon these using the decidedly unscientific method of baking them once and having them turn out pretty good! I've never made two pie crust recipes side by side, relying instead on the fuzzy memory of what I did last time and how it tasted, and seeing if I liked this current method better. More than once, I've thoroughly enjoyed a baked good I made and then promptly lost the recipe to the sands of the internet again, leaving me forever searching for that white whale of a glorious recipe (looking at you, cinnamon rolls that I cannot for the life of me replicate). And if a recipe does not turn out the way the author insists, I rarely revisit recipes to figure out where I went wrong, nor do I investigate things like why some pie fillings have corn starch vs flour and whether I have a preference (save for a sweep of due diligence through the empirical, scientifically-sound repository of testing that is Serious Eats's Food Lab). I almost never iterate on recipes, I can't tell at a glance if a new recipe will result in the kind of ___ that I like, and I have no idea how my results measure up with the real deal a lot of times (I first made roti, babka, and cream puffs all without having tasted anything but either a frozen variety, or, in the case of challah, a slice from a college bake sale that may as well have been a puck of sawdust). 

So, I've decided to change that by learning some French pastry, which is fairly structured and well-understood due to its age, and I have the dual standards of a strong public opinion and my own historical experiences to compare my results to. I'm beginning this journey by working my way through Patisserie: Mastering the Art of French Pastry by Christophe Felder (The Book). After a fair amount of research on the internet, this book comes up time and time again as a masterful compendium of both recipes and techniques, bolstered by its staggering amount of step-by-step color photos of various stages of each recipe. As a reference work, it's a magnificent, hot-pink 800 page tome that will be useful for any basic recipe from french pastry I'd like to make, and as a source of learning, each of its sections contains Easy, Intermediate, and Advanced categories of recipes designed to walk through both the fundamental recipes and techniques of pastry. 

My plan is to work through two recipes (at least) per week, doing at least one easy, one intermediate, and one advanced from most sections. I will mostly be posting reflections on the process and results here, with no actual recipes. 

Project 1: Pate Sablee

Crumbly sweet pastry, melting texture, rich in butter but otherwise light in texture. Used for tarts filled after baking, or shortbread and cake bases. Different from short pastry (pate brisee) due to the addition of sugar and egg yolk.

I started this recipe around 3pm on Friday. The recipe calls for one egg yolk in the crust; my egg yolk seemed on the small side, and after "sanding" the flour, butter, and sugar together (rubbing between the fingertips until small crumbs are formed) and adding the yolk, I had to do quite a bit of kneading before the dough cohered, and even then, it was crumbly and left many grains of sugar on my hands. Felder's recipe differs from most in that it does not specify for the butter to be softened to room temperature. I appreciated that this made the sanding easier, since the cold butter didn't form a paste as readily that would have clung to my fingers.

I chilled it for the requisite 2 hours, after which my dough did not look nearly as smooth as the photo, was extremely difficult/dry to roll out to the stated 1/8" (4-5mm), and cracked massively when I tried to roll it over my rolling pin to put in the pan. At least it did not stick at all to the board or rolling pin (though I'm unclear if this was a good thing. More on that later.) 

While the dough chilled, I made the orange pastry cream, which was mostly straightforward except that it told me to whisk constantly over medium heat until it thickened, and then let it boil (!!!) for 10 seconds. I admit I was a huge wimp, and only let a few small simmer bubbles escape through my cream before I snatched the saucepan off the burner and whisked furiously, hoping I had not scrambled my cream. It seemed fine, and very orangey due to the 2 oranges worth of zest (is there a size difference between american and french oranges?), and I scraped it into a bowl, placed the plastic wrap flush against the custard surface to keep a skin from forming, and put it in the fridge to chill.

I bought an anodized aluminum tart pan with removable bottom, which I rinsed with soap and water and brushed with a generous coat of melted butter with a silicone brush before setting in my rolled tart dough. I pricked it all over with a fork and set it into the oven for the blind bake.

Tart dough laid in the pan and pricked for blind baking

In The Book, it mentions that almost all French pastry, with the exception of Choux (profiteroles/cream puffs, eclairs, etc), is cooked using a convection oven. This makes sense, given the usual high proportion of butter in French pastry and the emphasis on crispness and browning of exteriors, but this was intimidating to me as many American pastries value moistness, and convection is rarely used. 

I chose to use the non-convection side of my oven for this recipe. There are two alternatives to not having a convection oven: Raise the temperature by 25 degrees Fahrenheit, or increase the baking time and keep an eye on it until it's done. Based on my oven thermometer (which I'm also not sure is calibrated well), my ovens run hot by about 30 degrees F, so I decided to compensate in both directions by turning my oven down to 325 instead of the stated 350, and opting for the higher end of the 15-20mins suggested. 

By the end of 21 minutes, the tart was just brown around the edges but the center remained fairly pale. It had bubbled in one spot but otherwise risen evenly. While I waited for it to cool, my friend Chris baked some cookies with the pastry scraps rolled out to about 1/4" (6.5mm) thick. He chilled the rolled and cut cookies in the fridge for about 10 minutes before baking, and they turned out into fine shortbread cookies, a little pale yet brown on the bottom (this happens to all my cookies in this new oven, I will investigate this later) but slightly puffed, no spread, and tender crumb. They were slightly crunchy after 14 minutes of baking. I had high hopes for the tart, but having read on the internet to never try and remove it from the pan before completely cool, I waited patiently until after dinner to try and demold the tart. 

Disaster. 

The tart shell was incredibly stuck to the pan. Somebody asked if I had buttered the pan (I had). Someone asked if I'd buttered it with glue (at this point, I wasn't so sure I hadn't). Setting the tart pan on a bowl slightly smaller than the ring had no effect, even as we tapped around the edges. I tried using a blow dryer to warm up the edges, and we tried to pry it out with toothpick shims, to no avail. Eventually, Chris flexed the entire pan back and forth until the majority of the crust released around the edges. You can see in the following photos where the entire perimeter didn't totally make it out intact. 

At this point, I threatened to throw the whole pan into the trash, tart and all. But I was convinced by Chris and my roommates to press onwards, so I filled the tart with the orange cream and sprinkled brown sugar onto the surface to brûlée, too frustrated at this point to freeze the tart for 5 minutes like the recipe called for. Having never torched anything but meat before, my housemate Kendrick offered his brazing torch (I somehow lost mine in the move a few months ago, and the random kitchen drawer torch was trash), and Chris offered to help me brûlée, so I could get an idea of what the caramelized sugar surface would look like without burning the sugar too much or cooking the pastry cream underneath.

Chris brûlée-ing the assembled tart

Nice crisp brûlée surface. My housemate Steven walked in and said "that's the nicest pizza I've ever seen" in a secondary roast to the already-torched tart

The tart was pretty good, but I noticed that the shell seemed a little crisp, similar to the cookies, and might have benefited from a higher temperature and shorter bake time. I believe it was supposed to be crumblier. And, of course, it was so, so stuck to the bottom of the tart pan. Not a single piece made it off intact, no matter how we chipped away at it with a combination of knives and spatulae.

I could patent this method as a novel glue.

As we sat around eating, I was feeling incredibly disheartened. I'd baked tarts before, and none of them had ever stuck to this degree. Nothing I'd ever baked had stuck to this degree! I scoured the internet, but people were convinced that

• Anodized Aluminum or stainless steel pans were the way to go
• Nonstick pans were not useful enough and would lose their coating eventually
• The crust would produce enough butter to lubricate its removal
• Gentle heating with a hairdryer would resolve any solidified butter inhibiting removal.

I was on the verge of buying a nonstick pan and moving onto a different recipe when Chris reminded me that the whole point of this baking endeavor was to improve my technical understanding of baking via iteration. So I began to make a second batch of tart dough, suspicions on the dryness of my dough bolstered somewhat by the mention in this blog that the author had to add a little of the egg white for the dough to come together. 

All in all, the modifications I made to the second iteration of the crust were: 

• Added half an egg white
• Added 10 more grams of butter (the full 140g in the recipe, since 1 stick and 1tbsp that I used last time only came out to 130g)
• Lightly floured the work surface while rolling out (see image below, where I was remiss in reading the recipe)
  

I sent this text to Chris while preparing to bake the second iteration on Saturday morning

After the dough had chilled and rested overnight, it looked notably more like the sample image from The Book in terms of internal texture and external smoothness. I noticed it was softer and smoother while working it together the night before, and now it did require a little bit of flour while rolling out. I rolled it out to slightly thicker than the stated 1/8" because 4-5mm is closer to a quarter and I figured a thicker shell would be less likely to shatter if it stuck again. The dough still cracked significantly while draping over the rolling pin to transfer into the buttered pan, but tart dough is forgiving and easily patched. I cut off the excess by rolling my rolling pin firmly across the top edge of the tart shell. This was very satisfying. The remainders of the dough turned into more shortbread cookies.

I baked it at the full "350" degree mark on my oven this time, for 20 minutes. It was immediately evident from the moment I pulled it out of the oven that this tart shell would not have the magnitude of sticking as the last. There was a visible gap between the edge of the tart and the fluting on the pan. The tart dough had shrunk down somewhat during baking, because I was hesitant to push it into the corners so much while pressing it into the pan for fear that I had been overzealous in my first iteration's pressing. I think now that I could have done it as thoroughly as the first time.

Minding the gap!

This time, I was able to unmold the entire shell with no difficulty once it was cooled (even from the bottom circle!).

Intact tart!

As my roommates were still busy consuming the remains of the orange cream tart from Friday, I decided that I would repurpose this tart shell for a friend's birthday party on Sunday. I stored the tart shell in a gallon ziploc bag at room temperature (though in all honesty, I wanted to frame it and hang it on the wall as proof that I would not be so easily defeated by a "Easy" recipe!). 

The following morning, I began preparations for the Apple Cranberry upside down tart. I have no photos of anything past this point because I was rushing to finish in time for the party! Though The Book calls for this to be made with Sable Breton (another shortbread pastry, with a higher ratio of butter/sugar to flour and 3 egg yolks, along with baking powder), the similarity between the pastry doughs led me to believe it would work fine for a fruit filled tart, especially because this one had the addition of a compote. 

Because rhubarb was hard to acquire out of season, I substituted a cranberry compote, thinking that the tartness would be similar, and set it into the fridge to chill. Making the sugar caramel was straightforward, and I could have been more aggressive with the heat because it took a long time while I was being cautious not to burn the sugar. Spreading it onto the parchment required several swipes, as the hot sugar tended to warp the aluminum quarter sheet pan I was using, but I eventually got it roughly into the shape of a ragged thin rectangle and let it cool.

To caramelize the apples, the recipe says to peel/core/quarter them, place them in a skillet with butter and orange juice, and place the caramel on top, sealing tightly with aluminum and baking for twenty minutes. Our house recently had a windfall of Fuji apples, which are both smaller and more watery than the honeycrisp that the recipe calls for (but are honeycrisps really baking apples? They're literally designed to be the best tasting raw apple!), but I had to use them up, which is why I suspect my skillet of baked apples was still a watery mess when I pulled it out of the oven. I had cut the apples into sixths because quarter apples seemed too large to eat as part of a tart in the park later, so I imagine this additional surface area contributed to the watery output. 

To reduce and cook the apples some more, I simmered the skillet on the stove for about ten minutes, reducing the juice to a sauce that coated the bottom of the apples and made them an attractive caramel color. I let them cool while I spread the melted white chocolate on the bottom and sides of the tart shell. The Book tells me that this is to keep the tart shell safe from the juices of the fruit, and I found it also added a little bit of nice sweetness and creaminess in an otherwise fruit-based tart. 

While the chocolate cooled and set in the tart shell, I peeled two mandarin oranges per the instructions, and cut them right before each set of white membranes to extract segments with their orange shiny sides. This was a pain, but all beauty is pain, I suppose. Trust the french to come up with a lovely hassle like such. 

By this time, the cranberry compote had cooled, so I spread it onto the tart as well, and it came tidily up to the edge of the tart's height. I placed the apples on one of their flat sides so that the caramel side faced obliquely out, making two concentric rings of apples. Finally, I placed a ring of mandarin orange segments in a circle that laid between the rings. The recipe calls for an apricot glaze, but, running late, and already several fruits and dirty dishes in, I opted to not add this. 

Observations I made while eating the tart (which everyone enjoyed mightily! People were shocked I made it! I continue to be my worst critic!):

• Cranberries have a distinct bitterness that outpaces that of rhubarb; I should have increased the sugar in the compote due to this quality.
• The thickness of the tart shell was probably not typical, but I liked that the additional thickness made it easier to eat while holding by hand (which is probably not usual, so I will consider this when making tarts to serve on plates in the future)
• Cutting the apples into sixths was the right call, and they probably would have been undercooked had I not simmered them down in the caramel on the stove. 
• I did not need the apricot glaze; I will study this mysterious finish at a future time. 
• The tart shell was less crisp and more buttery/crumbly than in the orange tart, which worked well with the chunkier toppings. I think this is due to a combination of not overbaking, adding more moisture, less working, and serving it the day after baking. 

To The Book's credit, I learned a lot just by doing these 1.5 recipes! It was well-designed to teach me sanding, had a forgiving pastry cream recipe, started with tart dough which is relatively forgiving in general, taught caramel making, taught a compote, etc. which are all good basic skills to have/refresh. Some specific takeaways and points of improvement: 

• I did not need pie weights for these tarts; pricking firmly to the bottom of the shell was sufficient to prevent bubbles. 
• It really is important to lay the dough into the bottom edge of the pan to prevent shrinking. 
• I was tempted to let the dough warm up for 10 mins after its chilling to aid in rolling out, but after seeing the shrinkage potential, I think it will be better to patch profusely than to risk gluten formation and thus stretching/shrinking. 
  
• That little bit of additional moisture from the half egg white helped me not overwork the dough the second time. I am glad I trusted my gut on this. 
• Still unclear why the tart was so stuck the first time??? Maybe the anodized aluminum needed a sacrificial baking to "season" all its nooks and crannies??
• I will allow the pastry cream its full 10 second boil next time, as well as its 5 minute pre-brulee freeze; it was a little runny when we were eating it. 
• Cutting segments out of oranges is much easier when you start with a whole peeled orange; I split the first one into halves but this made the first and last segment on each half kind of gnarly. 
  

Here is a photo of the daruma my partner's roommate gave us for the holidays, where I have marked the intent of my endeavor and will give it its other eye when I am "done" (have created all recipes in the Modern French Pastry book):

Daruma, who will get its second eye when I am able to make all the shiny cakes from Modern French Pastry

Quote of the week: "No, no, this is good. I feel like I'm watching character development." - Chris, when I apologized for deciding that I would make a second tart dough instead of hanging out more focusedly with him on Friday night.