Pastry Chef School: Tarts
This week in pastry school we baked a bunch of tarts.
We started off the week by baking, assembling and decorating Bretons. Each breton was cut and then baked in a ring mold (3"-8"). They puff up on the side creating a rim and work great for fluid gel fillings. We filled our bretons with Passion Fruit & Apricot Jam, Pastry Cream, Chocolate Namelaka and Whipped Cream.
What’s a Chocolate Namelaka? It’s chocolate and a liquid stabilized using gelatin to make a pastry cream consistency.
What’s the assembly for the featured Breton above? It’s 1tbsp of jam on the bottom, completely cover in pastry cream kisses and then dab in more jam. Dabbing in more jam exposes the hidden layer of jam by giving hints of it on top. That’s really smart and I like that.
This Hazelnut-Rosemary Tart was delicious. The crushed toasted hazelnuts were sprinkled on the bottom of the crust, filling was poured in and during baking the hazelnuts floated up to the top.
What makes this a Rosemary Tart? The tart filling is a pretty standard egg based custard with one major exception: we infused the butter with rosemary. The herby flavour really made this work. Really great flavour combination.
This lemon tart is super interesting since it had a cooked filling that never got baked.
How to make a cooked filling tart? We completely baked the tart shell. We then cooked the egg based lemon custard to 181°F over a baine marie. Once it cooled to 140°F we emulsified the custard with almost a 1:1 butter with an immersion blender for 5–10m. Finally we just poured the filling into the tart and let it cool in the fridge. The fat sets up nicely in the fridge.
This Lemon-Lime tart is beautiful. We made an italian brown sugar meringue, spread that on top of the tart, using the back of a spoon made beautiful waves and finally bruleed those.
This Rhubarb Tart had a beautiful hazelnut crumble. What makes it a hazelnut crumble is adding ground hazelnut to the crumble mixture.
Rhubarb is super tart and needs to be toned down. So we cooked our in hot simple sugar syrup.
This Chocolate-Caramel Tart was just delicious. The filling itself was a chocolate mixture folded in with french meringue and yolk french meringue. The interesting part was the Runny Caramel Sauce on the bottom. It’s meant to leak out as soon as the tart is cut.
To read more about my pastry adventures read last week’s post:
