Tyler Florence’s Chocolate Tart
Posted on | December 2, 2011 | No Comments
This is the story of how I stepped away from one or two-bowl “quick baking” and took my time to make a classic dessert for a dinner party that I attended a couple of weeks ago. A friend and I had been planning a dinner party for a few weeks, and he put me in charge of dessert. The theme was “French bistro”, and when I innocently told him that I was contemplating making a chocolate tart for dessert, his eyes lit up and he broke out into a huge smile.
I knew what I had to do.
Armed with my new shiny tart pan (as a general rule, I try to stay away from accumulating too many kitchen tools/gadgets until I settle down into a more permanent home — but I had to bend my own rule for this tart pan!), I scoured the internet for a classic chocolate tart recipe and, after much deliberation, decided to go with Tyler Florence’s Chocolate Tart recipe. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I wanted to concentrate on using high-quality ingredients and technique.
To me, there is something very fascinating about forming a dough to make a crust for a pie (or in this case, a tart).
It wasn’t about finding “healthy substitutions” or short-cuts to arriving at the finished product faster.
It was about mixing flour, butter, sugar, and salt together and mixing everything together with your fingers. No pastry cutter needed.
It was about creating the “well” that I’d read about in many recipes and pouring an egg and water mixture in to form the dough.
It was about saying a little prayer and hoping that the ingredients would come together and form a dough.
When that happened, I wrapped it up and put it in the fridge just like Tyler told me to do.
After 30 minutes were up, I rolled the dough out on a sheet of wax paper, rolled it back onto my rolling pin and carefully laid it out onto my tart pan. It wasn’t perfect, but for a first attempt, it was to me.
My first regret was wishing I had done a better job at documenting my progress. Some people take photographs to document special events like graduations and weddings – I take photographs to document my first from-scratch crust. Priorities, right?
Could you believe that Williams-Sonoma was sold out of pie weights? Dried beans turned out just fine…
It’s kind of funny how giddy I was when I pulled this out of the oven…
The chocolate filling was easy to make. Again, I focused on using high quality ingredients and let them do the rest of the work.
My second regret, was being a little too overzealous when pouring the filling into the tart shell – some of it spilled over the edge. Despite my Type-A personality panicking over the “ruined” tart, I was assured that flavour of the tart was not ruined in the least.
It may have taken a significant chunk out of my Saturday afternoon to put together, but you know what? Baking is therapeutic, and at the end of the day, there’s nothing better than knowing that you were able to share your baking success with a table full of friends.
And, you’d better believe I’ve already used the tart pan again.
Comments
Leave a Reply