School Has TART Me A Lot! — Desserts for Days

Please excuse the lame pun, but I had to! It's been a full-blown tart week!! This week in school has been crazy busy, but I think that it's been my favorite week to date! Like I said in my last post, I'm a sucker for pies (and tarts) and that's what we've been doing all week! Our unit on pies and tarts is 10 days long -- double the length of the cookies unit. I can't wait to see what we get into next week, because this week has been filled with so many delicious sweet (and savory) treats!

Monday we ended up taking home two tarts, one sweet and one savory. There was a LOT to do to get those tarts completed, though. Thankfully, we made plenty of dough last Friday so that was one less thing that we had to do. All we needed to do was get it rolled out and in the tart ring. I've never made a tart in a tart ring prior to school. I usually make pies, but I've made a tart on a couple occasions, however I've only used those pans with the fluted sides and the removable bottom. I have to say, a tart ring is a million times easier, at least I think! Our first step for our first tart of the week was to roll out our dough. Rolling dough out into a circle is harder than I imagined. Whenever I've made pies or tarts in the past, I always end up with an "amoeba shape." You know, those funky, misshaped blobs. Yeah, my dough always looked like that, but it's never really presented an issue. In school they want us to try for a circle, and by the end of this week, I have a much better handle on it, but it wasn't easy the first time. Once our dough was rolled out, put in the ring, and stuck in the fridge to chill, it was time to poach our pears for the Tarte Bourdaloue!

After our poaching liquid was made -- which consisted of wine, water, sugar, and a vanilla bean, we plopped in our pears and made a cartouche, and just let them sit in the liquid for awhile. This way, they had time to absorb all those delicious flavors! While the pears were poaching, we put together our onion tart. To be honest, I wasn't sure how I felt about this one. I'm not a big fan of tomatoes or blue cheese, but I gave it a try. Definitely wasn't bad, but personally, I couldn't eat more than a slice or two.

Not that it tasted bad, but it just wasn't my thing. Since this was a free-form tart, rather than one that we make in the rings, Chef Jeanne was joking that if it wasn't perfect, we'll just say it's "rustic." Pretty funny, and it's true, I think. Everything is "rustic" nowadays. We formed our tart shell by hand, then layered in all the ingredients -- caramelized onions, chopped walnuts, tomatoes, and blue cheese.

We took our dinner break, and when we came back, it was time to get our Tarte Bourdaloue finished! We pulled our tart rings out, and leveled them so there wouldn't be any excess dough, and made almond cream in the mixer to lay on the bottom of the tart shell. This was an utterly comical experience. We made a HUGE batch of almond cream, so much so that when all was said and done (and wrapped in plastic wrap), you could've mistaken it for a small pillow. Since the method we used to make almond cream required almond paste, it and there was just so much if it, it just barely fit in the mixer. There were definitely times that my partner and I had to hold our hands up to the sides of the bowl to keep it from spilling out.

This tart is was probably my favorite one we made this week. Not only was it pretty, but it tasted so good! I love pears, and this just took them to the next level. Chef Jeanne said that this one is going to be on our test at the end of the unit, so I'll definitely be making it again at home to get some more practice.

On Wednesday, it was even more busy! Hard to believe, really, but we made four tarts each! Granted, two of them were lil' baby tarts, but still! The first thing that we did, after rolling out our dough, of course, was make pastry cream! While we were making the pastry cream, we did blind baking on our tart shells. This meant that we baked them first, without filling, just to get the structure set, then we can either continue to bake at a later time with a filling (like the almond cream layer on the big fruit tart), or just fill as is (like the banana cream and small fruit tarts).

This was the first of 3 types of custard that we'll make over the course of the program. There's stirred, baked, and starch-based. The pastry cream that we were making on Wednesday was a starch-based custard, because it had pastry cream powder to bind it together. Even Chef Jeanne said she wasn't 100% sure what was in it, but when it's cooled, it's almost like a piece of rubber, it's really strange, honestly. I was able to get a close up picture of it, and you can just see the little vanilla bean seeds suspended in it, which I thought was really cool. We used this cream in two different ways on Wednesday night: just by itself on the fruit tarts, then in a banana cream tart, we folded the pastry cream together with some unsweetened whipped cream (which was whipped by hand!), for a slightly lighter texture.

After the fruit tart was all assembled, we brushed it with a nappage (apricot glaze) so it was nice and shiny! Then from there, we assembled our banana cream tarts! Now, I'm not the biggest fan of cream pies and tarts, in general. There's only been one banana cream pie I've ever liked, and it was one that I made in a class at Sur La Table (recipe here, for those interested), so I had pretty high hopes for the one we were making in class. Like I said before, for the "cream" part of this pie, we mixed our jelly-like pastry cream with some unsweetened whipped cream to get a nice, light creamy texture, then we folded in our bananas, and then topped it with sweetened whipped cream. Phew, that's a lot of cream. When all was said and done, it was delicious. I actually loved it, and it's something that I would totally make again. That's now two banana cream pies / tarts that I really enjoy! Woohoo!

Moving onto Friday, it was a little more hectic than anything, not super busy, per se. When we first got into class at 6, we went in and took our ServSafe Manager's exam. We've been leading up to this test pretty much since our first week here. We had some sort of lecture almost every day on the topics. Some days we were a little pressed for time, so we also have a book that we were given on the first day to study from. I think that I passed, at least I hope. It was 90 questions, and we had two hours to finish it. We only need to get a 70% to pass, and every practice test I took, I got at least an 85%, so I think I'll be okay. We get our results in a couple of weeks, via email.

After the test though, we had lost two hours of time, which when you only have 5 hours to work with, that's a huge chunk! We got right into prepping for our recipe for the day, which was supposed to be a Tarte Alsacienne, which is basically a custard apple tart sort of thing. The problem was, there were only 7 apples, when we needed 28. Whoops. There was a mix up of some kind, but instead of making one of those tarts per person, instead, one person per team made a Tarte Alsacienne (with either apples or pears, since we were short on the apples) and the other person made a Quiche Lorraine because Chef Stephany found a ton of bacon and gruyere in the store room that no one had labelled for anything. We make do with what we have! We'll make the quiche again, on day 9 of the tarts and pies unit, but that's totally fine by me :) I love quiche, so there were no complaints here!

I worked on the pear version of the Tarte Alsacienne while my partner worked on the Quiche Lorraine. I tried to grab two plump, evenly shaped pears. I remember from the Tart Bourdaloue, that it's a little more difficult to make things pretty if you have wonky shaped pears. Fortunately, I was able to find two really nice, similarly shaped pears, that were just beautiful. After they were peeled, cored, and sliced into wedges, we caramelized them in a pan, then we got to flambé them!! Yes, FLAMBÉ! Fire! I've never flambé'd anything before, so this was super exciting for me.

Now, you might be thinking, how the heck do you flambé with an induction stove? You get creative, that's how. It was a two step process of pouring our brandy over our fruit, then hitting it with a torch instantly. My partner was the one doing this, so I was able to get a picture, which was really neat. Once our pan was like, we had to yell FLAMBÉ! It was pretty cool, I've gotta say. Everyone ended up chiming in every time somebody's pan was lit on fire, which was a lot of fun!

After that, we spread the fruit into a pan to cool off, and we made two custards: one for the fruit tart and one for the quiche. After that, it was a pretty quick process of getting them in the oven. Arrange your fruit / bacon and cheese on the bottom of the tart shell, pour the custard over the top, and pop it in the oven. We baked them until there was no wiggle or jiggle in the custard, and that was it! Since we weren't able to each take home our own tart, we split them in half, and we each got half a Tarte Alsacienne (with pears) and half of a Quiche Lorraine. I had a piece of the quiche for breakfast this morning, and it was quite tasty!

And that's a wrap on this week! We made up a quick batch of dough to use next week, and we got cleaned up, and were able to head home a couple minutes early!

Stay tuned for my blog next week, and if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.

Thanks for reading!