Sweet 'n Savage Eats

This recipe is fairly easy – it doesn’t require a lot of fancy ingredients and it’s pretty simple to mix up the ingredients. The time consuming part comes with setting up the tart itself. And that doesn’t require a lot of skill either, just a lot of patience!

You will need:

• Parbaked tart shells: I recommend using the Rich Flaky Pastry with Praline Paste dough. I’ve had the opportunity to use this dough a few times now, and it’s by far and away my favorite tart dough I’ve worked with so far. The texture is fabulous and you can get a nice thin dough without a lot of cracks or breakage in the crust. The taste is great too – it’s not so sweet that you can’t use it for a savory tart, in fact I just used it for a flamiche a few days ago.
• 2 1/2 lbs of baking apples (~6 apples) Peeled and thinly sliced. I’ve used both Pink Ladies and Golden Delicious, in my opinion the Golden Delicious works much better in a pie, the Pink Ladies were a bit too tart for my taste.
• 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice.
• 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon cornstarch

In a large bowl combine sliced apples, lemon juice, sugars, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Toss to mix. Let the apples macerate in mixture for 30 min to 3 hours at room temperature. Don’t go beyond 3 hours, otherwise you may find it difficult to handle the slices.

Once the apples have completed macerating, transfer the apples to a colander suspended over a bowl to capture the liquid. I don’t have a colander handy, so I used my tiny strainer. I really need to get a colander. My life would’ve been much simpler.

Boil the liquid with the butter down to about half it’s original amount in a small saucepan over medium high heat. In the meantime toss the apples with the cornstarch nutil all traces of liquid have disappeared.

Pour the syrup over the apples, tossing gently. Arrange the apples, overlapping the slicess in concentratic circles in the tart shell.

Keep adding slices until you have used all of the slices. Pour any remaining apple juices evenly over the apples. You should now have some beautiful rosette tarts!

Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes or until golden brown. And yes, I purposefully used my saddest looking tart that used the last remaining scraps to be baked as this was a taste test tart, and not the real deal. So your real deal tarts should look much nicer than this

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Of course you can also make this in a regular pie pan. In this case, you will want to cover the pie with aluminum foil with 3 vents cut in and centered on a cookie sheet to prevent the liquids from boiling over. And no, you don't want it to get as brown as I let it get!

Since we now have completed making the praline paste (which, by the way, tastes amazing as a peanut butter substitute in a PB&J) we can now forge ahead with the tart dough recipe I wanted to try! The rich flake pastry with praline paste and hazelnuts. My main reason for wanting to try out this dough, besides my adoration for praline, is that this dough supposedly does not shrink as it cooks so there’s no need for baking beans or rice, which just saves me that one extra step. For this recipe you will need:

• 250g Pastry Flour*
• 90g Confectioner’s Sugar
• 150g Softened Unsalted Butter
• 1 Egg, beaten
• 25g Finely Ground Almonds
• 15g Praline Paste
• 2g Salt
• 5g Vanilla Sugar**

*Pastry flour equivalent: 4 cups of AP flour blended with 2.25 cups of Cake Flour.

**Place 4 vanilla beans in with 1 lbs of sugar in a glass jar and store away from light.

Sift the flour over your work surface and create a hollow. Sprinkle the salt and ground almonds around the edge of the hollow then place the softened butter, sugars, and praline paste in the center of the hollow.

Use your fingers to blend the sugars, paste, and butter together until the mixture reaches a velvety texture.

Start bringing in the flour little by little with your fingers to the center and rub the mixture lightly beween your hands until it resembles a coarse meal. Create another hollow and pour in the beaten egg.

Bring the dough into the center and knead lightly. Create a ball with the dough and wrap in plastic wrap. Let the dough rest in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours, ideally overnight.

After it has been chilled, remove from the fridge and allow to rest at room temperature for 10 minutes. And allow the rolling to commence!

I wanted to try out a new type of tart dough this week, however the recipe called for some praline paste, which is not readily available in grocery stores. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a tiny can of it online, only to have to wait a week for it to be shipped and arrive, so I decided to look up how to make it. Surprisingly enough, it’s fairly easy to make! Water, sugar, hazelnuts, and oil are about all the ingredients you will need. You may want to add some salt to enhance the taste of the caramel, but that’s entirely up to you.

First off, you need to start out with some hazelnuts, also know as filberts. This is about 3/4 of a pound here:

I wasn’t very smart about this. I roasted the hazelnuts first, then attempted to remove the skins the “traditional way” which is rubbing the nuts (oooh, that sounds dirty) together in a clean kitchen towel. Let me set the record straight. The “traditional way” sucks. After searching on the wonderful invention that is Google, I discovered a much easier method which I will now relay to you. Before roasting the hazelnuts, boil them in water for about 3-4 minutes with about 3 tbsps of baking soda. Drain in a colander and rinse with cold water. The skins will come right off with a little help from you. THEN roast the nuts. This will make your life much easier.

Now that we have the skins off, roast the hazelnuts for about 10-15 minutes at 350 F, stirring occasionally in order to avoid burning. You now have roasted hazelnuts. Yay.

Now onto the caramel. You will need equal parts of sugar and water. I used 3:3 cups, I think you could get away with 2:2, there was a lot more caramel than nuts in the end. Combine in a pot and set over medium high heat. Do not stir. Stirring may cause crystalization which you want to avoid. After a little bit of boiling, the sugar will dissolve itself into the water, like so:

After some time, the sugar reduction will be more apparent and you will be able to see the caramelization take place. Once the sugar reduction starts changing color, you want to pay attention so that the sugar does not burn.

Once the sugar reduction has reached the color of your preference, add the hazelnuts and stir. Do this rapidly as the caramel will begin to harden immediately. Pour the mixture onto some parchment paper set on a sheet pan, level the mixture, and allow to cool.

Once cool, break the brittle up into pieces and toss it in the food processor. Today I learned that my food processor dislikes chopping up this much brittle at one time and will overheat. So you might want to do half and half, unless you make a smaller batch. Initially you will notice that the brittle is ground to a fine consistency, but the hazelnuts will begin to ooze out some oil and a paste will begin to form. It may be necessary to add some oil to get the consistency of your choosing. A nut oil is preferred, but vegetable oil is fine as well. You may add salt to taste at this point as well if you so choose. Salt can really enhance the flavor of caramel, so I personally enjoy adding it.

And voila! You now have praline paste. Good to be mixed with pastry cream, or used like peanut butter, or eaten right off the spoon, if the fancy strikes you. Or in my case, as an ingredient in a tart dough.

So you’ve caught me. There might be a bit of a pear theme going on here. But I have always been a fan of the savory and I do require something “salty” to counteract the sweets. Or should I say savage to the sweets? I mean really. They’re pears. Wrapped in bacon. How much more savage can you get? (In a good way of course!) This is not in any recipe books, this is just something I picked up along the years and enjoy playing around with. So since we already learned how to poach pears in the last post, this should be a relatively easy one!

You will need:

• Poached Pears
• Bacon of your choosing
• A muffin tin, mini muffin tins work especially well for this
• Toothpicks

Preheat oven to 425 F.

After you’ve poached some more pears and let them sit overnight, cut them into ~1 inch cubelike shapes. They’re pears, so obviously they’re not going to be perfect cubes. But c’mon. They’re wrapped in bacon. Who cares?

I personally like to carmelize the bacon a bit, by coating the bacon strips in a this layer of brown sugar. This is optional and will depend on your bacon, because this can be overbearingly sweet. I like nice big thick slabs of bacon though. For each cube of pear, you will need half a strip of bacon.

Wrap the pear in the bacon, then stab through with a toothpick to secure the bacon to the fruit. Lay the toothpick across the muffin cup.

Bake at 425 F until the bacon is cooked through. Usually 10-15 minutes, depending on your oven.

Voila, you now have bacon awesomeness: