Tarte Tatin

It's a good thing I picked up a cast iron pan in time for apple season. I've been taking full advantage of both. Inspired by Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (and how can you not be?), I decided to give Tarte Tatin a whirl. Not only that, but I made my own pie crust, after years of buying them frozen.

What took me so long?

This dessert is simple, as Waters promises, and simultaneously rustic and elegant. It celebrates wholesome, delicious ingredients without complication:

Pie Crust (Homemade or store bought) 

2-3 Apples (I used local Tompkins King apples.) 

Butter, 2 Tbsp.

Sugar, 6 Tbsp.

First, I prepared an entire recipe of Waters' "Tart & Pie Dough" from earlier in the book, refrigerating one half for the Tarte Tatin and freezing the other half for next time. (It ended up making the trip to Maryland in my cooler for the Tarte Tatin I made for my apple loving brother.)

Peel and core apples. Slice into thin segments (eights or sixteenths). It is important that they are as uniform as possible.

Oven preheated to 400°F. Butter and sugar combined in a 9-inch cast iron pan over medium heat. Stir until caramelized, careful not to burn! Remove the pan from heat. My caramel making skills need a lot of work, mainly because it involves paying careful attention and not getting distracted. This is a great example of how cooking can make me a better person. The promise of delicious, unburned caramel may be just the incentive I need to train myself.

Arrange apple slices perpendicular to the outside edge of the pan, pointy sides up. Make another ring inside that one. Then fill these rings in, pointy sides down this time, nestled between the first set of rings. Fill in gaps with smaller pieces. Lay pastry over the apples, tucking it between the apples and the pan.

Bake 30-40 minutes. Give the pan a gentle shake when you take it out of the oven, to loosen the apples. Put the serving plate face down over the pan and flip over. Gently lift the pan off. Serve with vanilla ice cream, yogurt, whipped cream, or just naked. Delicious warm or at room temp. Delightful with ice wine.

 This is how I made my Tarte Tatin, but this narrative is no substitute for Waters' eloquent description of her method in The Art of Simple Food. I highly recommend checking the book out, particularly the practical and poetic piece on "Rolling Out Tart Dough," which was a revelation.

Bringing Jean Georges home

       The sweet and sour jus served with the snapper at Jean Georges bewitched me. I couldn't get it out of my head. Aside from butter, I couldn't put my finger on the ingredients I was tasting. I only knew the rich combination of flavors was intoxicating. Of course, upon reading the recipe the secret ingredient was obvious-- mushrooms!

     I was mainly interested in recreating the sauce, so I decided to concentrate on that, leaving the nut and seed crusting for next time. The trick was browning the butter slowly. Next time, I'll clarify the butter and keep a closer eye on it so it doesn't go quite so brown.

This is a totally different type of cooking from what I'm used to, giving you less freedom to multitask and requiring more careful attention to each step. It is an useful exercise in timing and discipline. I used sherry vinegar in place of the Banyuls vinegar. For the summer vegetables which swim in the buttery sauce, I used the last few cherry tomatoes from my garden, along with baby red potatoes and yellow pearl onions for some variety of color. (The mushrooms that were strained out of the sauce made an awesome addition to my scrambled eggs the next morning.)

I wasn't thrilled with the red snapper at Wegman's that day, so I chose some much nicer looking haddock fillets which were a couple dollars less per pound, which I pan fried simply and served over top.

The flavor was as I remembered it. Patrick and I enjoyed it outside (while we can!), watching another one of Seneca Lake's legendary sunsets. We paired it with a bottle of Lamoreaux Landing's 2007 Reserve Chardonnay, a beautiful complement. Butter all around!