Lesson 5: Traditional French Apple Tart

So today's lesson was about tarts again. The difference between this tart and the fruit tart in Lesson 4 was that the the traditional apple tart has to be baked twice. Once with just the pastry and the second time with the apple filling. Today we had a new chef instructor, chef Guillame. I only knew later that he is the 'bakery' guru! And such a nice instructor he was! The nicest so far I would say.

We were suppose to roll out the pastry to for the apple tart. And I already sensed that something was not very right when I first rolled it out. My pastry cracked at the sides, and I still kept rolling it, and it still cracked! So I got a bit of help from the chef. He asked me to put my dough in the fridge for a while, and after that it was a bit better but still cracked. So this was the first mistake. The second was worse! We were suppose to put the dough on top of the tart ring, with the parchment paper below. And guess what! I forgot to put a parchment paper below! And was a bit panicky at that stage. Good thing chef came to the rescue again, and he helped me put the dough in the blast chiller, and later used a scraper to scrape the dough out. The dough broke a bit, but it was ok. Second mistake, checked!

Here comes the third one! We were suppose to press the sides of the dough with our fingers so that we can crimp the pastry later. So what I did was ok, but I didn't leave enough dough to crimp!!! So when the crimping was done, it looked quite bad! Felt a bit disappointed that day actually, but I guess I can do a bit of practice at home with this.

Chef's Apple Tart

Li Lian's Apple Tart

Panya gave a 6.5 for this apple tart. Chef said it turned out ok despite all the screw-ups I did! But if you do look closely, all the edges are not properly done! Definitely an item to practice this one!