Happy Thanksgiving to each and every one of you!  Thank you for taking the time to read; I appreciate it.  This isn’t very Thanksgiving-y but still pretty tasty.  So, while you recover from your food coma, consider this for one of your upcoming holiday parties or just simply as a special treat!

So, a while ago I promised I would post a recipe for a classic French apple tart and I used a recipe from the text book from the International Culinary Center, the school I attended.  Besides old fashioned procrastination with this post, I have run into a bit of a problem.  That is to say that I thought the book with the recipe was available for public purchase.  However, after an initial search on the school’s website, I’m not so sure that’s the case.  As such, I don’t feel comfortable posting the exact recipe as I can’t credit it back to something you, the reader, can reference and I definitely don’t feel comfortable posting the exact recipe without permission.  So, I decided on a happy medium that I hope can work.  I’m going to walk through the various stages of making a tart and how to assemble it.  I’ll provide a link or two for a good tart dough recipe that would work in lieu of the exact one I used to make mine.  Anyway, let’s try it that way.

Tarts are pretty easy to pull off, but they do take some time.  Like making pie, how much you handle the dough and giving it incremental rests will result in a flakier, better textured crust.  For mine, I used a classic tart recipe and made a pretty straightforward compote as the base.  The sliced apples used for the topping retained their skin for extra color.  I prefer it that way and like the way it looks.  However, that is very much a no-no for a traditional French tart.  You’ll notice from the pictures that the sliced apples are arranged very neatly around the tart and make for a very beautiful finished product.  You’ll also notice that mine is slightly uneven and not the greatest looking from a presentation standpoint…story of my life with baking.  I lose patience with the precision of it and find myself hurrying…go slowly and have patience with it.  If not, hey, the imperfections make it look homemade and there’s nothing wrong with that!  The recipe follows after the jump… Continue reading →