Hey Swee-Tart

I really need to keep a little more up to date.. I’m sure you guys don’t really mind. Anyhow, this class was pretty good. We made a couple of types of tarts. One was an egg tart, aka QUICHE!! This was pretty awesome. I never thought I would be making a quiche from scratch. Though I guess I knew I was going to when I saw the class in level 2 making them, when I was in level 1. Anyhow, the dough is the critical part. The dough is called Pâte Brisee. It is primarily flour, ice water (some call for an egg and less water), a pinch of salt, a touch of sugar, and lots of butter! It is important to keep in mind that this is a very fragile dough, and the ingredients, primarily the wet ones, must be kept VERY COLD! The butter is meant to stay cool and unmelted, which helps keep the tart nice and flaky.

The first step is to “sabler” the butter into the flour sugar and salt mixture. You take a pastry scraper and “cut” the butter into the flour so in the end you have pea sized pieces of butter in the flour. Next you make a well and incorporate the water (and egg) into the flour/butter mixture. You must work quickly, keeping everything cool. You try not to use your hands to keep the butter from melting, hence the pastry scraper. After the dough comes together a little, you need to take walnut sized pieces of dough that you just made, and using the scraper, flatten and scrape the piece to flatten the butter. But that piece aside and finish doing this to the rest of the dough. Again, time is of the essence. Gather it all back together, flatten into a disk and stick that puppy in the freezer for a few. The butter must stay COLD!

Anyhow, we made 3 batches of this dough; 1 with just water, 1 with egg and water, and the last with egg, water and sugar. After we flatten and fit the dough into a “flan ring” we have to blind bake it. This is basically pre-baking with weights on it to keep it from rising. Because the quiche is very delicate and cooks at such a low temp, we must make sure the crust fully cooks so its not raw when the filling cooks.

The quiche was absolutely delicious! It consisted of bacon bits, gruyere cheese and a delicious egg and cream custard. We baked it low and slow (around 300, to keep the eggs from scrambling), and it was superb.

With the sugar dough, we made an apple tart which was really tasty! Our apples on top didn’t look nearly as pretty as some other peoples apples, but that’s fine. They tasted just as delicious.
Since we made more dough than we needed, somehow I volunteered to take most of them home. So I have about 6 doughs sitting in my freezer. I already made a quiche which was great, and an apple tart, which, due to the apples I used on top, did not taste as good as the ones we made in class. Further, I do not know what the effect of freezing the dough has on the final product, but if there is none, then the fact that I was using other people’s dough that I did not make, I do not know how well they made it. I have lots of faith in my own, but I can only trust someone else to a certain extent.