Asked and answered: A French apple tart from quick puff pastry

Hello! Hello! and yes, I’m just back from Paris (and I’ve got a lot of Paris things to tell you about – coming up soon).

I know this won’t surprise you, but when I sent you the recipe for Quick (Rough/Blitz) Puff Pastry and asked if you’d like the recipe for the apple tart that Priscilla Martel and I made with our dough, you said YES!

I finally got around to writing it for you and I hope you won’t be disappointed when you see it — it’s almost not a recipe! It reminds me of the kind of No-Recipe Recipes that Sam Sifton collected into a cookbook and often included in the Wednesday edition of his NYT Cooking Newsletter. He now writes the newsletter twice a week — the ingenious Melissa Clark writes it splendidly the other days; it’s still free and still a terrific read.

With this tart, once you’ve got the dough, the recipe is essentially: roll out the dough, cover it with apples and bake. I’ll give you more details, but if you’re raring to go, you don’t really need a lot more info. The dough is the key to making this elegant French tart on the spur of any moment.

I’ve got the recipe for you and a few “Good to Know Before You Start” pointers below. But here’s the important pointer: Play with the dough! Make it often. Get used to how it feels, how it comes together, how it rolls and how it bakes. I’m convinced that this dough can become a signature for you. Something you’ll make regularly and something you’ll have in the freezer all the time for cheese twists and turnovers, galettes and tartes fines — that’s the official name for this apple tart and all the others that are just fruit baked on a thin “platter” of puff pastry. And maybe even quiches and fruit tarts baked in fluted tart pans. The idea to use the dough for more traditional tarts came to mind because my Parisian friends always have store-bought rolled-out rounds of all-butter puff pastry on hand (every French supermarket has these), and they use them for anything that might call for sweet tart dough or pâte brisée or even pie dough. For them, convenience trumps convention.

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FRENCH APPLE TART

GOOD TO KNOW BEFORE YOU START

The dough: We’re using homemade quick puff pastry – here’s the how-to and recipe. However, since this is a kind of no-recipe recipe, and since it’s more about riff than rigor, you can use whatever pastry you have: store-bought puff pastry is good here (although you’ll need to prick it well, since it puffs a lot) as is a thinly rolled-out round of sweet tart dough, pâte brisée or pie dough.

The apples: The traditional apples for this kind of tart in France is, wait for it … Golden Delicious, an apple that isn’t much prized for pie-baking in America. What you’re looking for is an apple with flavor, some sweetness, a little tartness and enough body to hold its shape when it emerges from about 40 minutes in the oven. No Macintoshes, please. And, if you can manage it, no Granny Smiths either — they’re too dry. Yes to Fuji and Gala and maybe Cosmic Crisp or one of the new hybrid apples that are in the markets now and that are sweet and have a little juice. Play around and you’ll find your sweetheart.

Planning ahead: If you’d like to get a head start so that you can serve the tart close to just-baked, you can have the dough rolled out, pricked all over and either in the refrigerator or the freezer. If it’s in the freezer, you can just pull it out and get to work, no need to defrost it. As for the apples, you can get those sliced ahead as well — toss them with some lemon juice to keep them from turning brown. You can do the apples a couple of hours in advance — and keep them covered either in the fridge or on the counter.

The serving size is variable, but a 10- to 12-inch tart will make 6 servings

INGREDIENTS

DIRECTIONS

Position a rack in the upper third of the oven and preheat it to 425 degrees F. (If, like Priscilla, you keep a baking stone in the oven, you can preheat it to 400 degrees F.) You can make the tart on a pizza pan or a baking sheet (you might want to flip the sheet over and use the bottom so that you don’t have to slide the tart over the sheet’s rim). If you’d like, cut a parchment circle with a diameter of about 12 inches to use as a template.

Working on a lightly floured surface and dusting the dough with flour as needed, roll the dough out to a thickness of between 1/16 and 1/8 inch and a diameter of about 12 inches (a little larger or a little smaller is fine). Take a look at Priscilla’s dough in the picture to get a sense of it:

Trim the dough so that you’ve got a nice round and save the scraps — you can re-roll them or keep them just the way they are, sprinkle them with sugar or salt and bake them for nibbles. Priscilla and I each used fluted pasta cutters to cut the dough, but a paring knife or a pizza wheel are good tools, too. If the dough isn’t on the pan or sheet, slide it on now. Prick it all over with the tines of a fork or the tip of a knife, or don’t — the weight of the apples will keep the dough from puffing too exuberantly.

Peel three of the apples (keep the fourth aside – you may or may not need it), halve, core and slice them thinly. The tart bakes best if the apples are not sliced paper-thin — you want them to be about 1/8 inch, but not thinner. They should be thin enough to bend slightly and thick enough to keep their shape and texture under heat. Hold on to the odd-shaped bits — you’ll be using those, too. (Slice the fourth apple, if needed.)

Starting from the edge, arrange the slices in a circle; overlap them a bit. Fill the center of the tart with the ends and bits of apples — they’ll give your tart a little height — and then cover them by forming another circle of overlapping slices to fill the space.

Brush the apples with melted butter and then dust with powdered sugar — you want to coat (not bury) the slices.

Priscilla with her ready-to-bake tart

Bake the tart for 30 to 40 minutes, until the underside of the pastry is crisp and golden all the way to the center — pull out the tart and pick it up so that you can peek. You can poke the apples to see if they’re baked through, but if the pastry’s done, it’s just about a sure bet that the apples will be too. Bonus if your apples get deeply brown around the edges.

Slide the pan onto a cooling rack and let the tart sit for about 20 minutes. You want it to cool some, but you also want the apples to have time to go from looking slightly dry to glowing (happily, they do that on their own – no human intervention needed). The tart is best warm or at room temperature, so when you’re ready to serve, move it to a platter. Serve with whipped cream or ice cream or just the joy of having made something so good and so pretty, so quickly and so easily.

STORING: You can reheat the tart in a hot oven for a few minutes if you must, but really it’s best enjoyed within a few hours of baking.

📚 You can find more recipes in my latest book BAKING WITH DORIE.

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