A fruit tart is a ubiquitous pastry, as old school as it comes and typically sells really well on any menu.  I’ve done them in the past and will no doubt do them in the future.  The large varietal, the ten to twelve inch pastry shell loaded down with pastry cream and too much fruit, can basically blow me.  Sure they look nice whole, but how do you get a clean slice out of an artful display of fruit that’s brushed with simple syrup or apricot glaze?  I can’t.  Best I can hope for is a mashed up mess of cookie, cream, and fruit.  The precision baker loathes a large fruit tart, least ways one intended to eat.  I can understand the exactitude required to make a showpiece, but you don’t eat a showpiece.

Now the individual variety, as pictured here, is something I can get behind.  It arrives on your plate as a simple showcase of quality ingredients.  In this case, the plate is smeared with a buttery lemon curd, the thin pate sucree shell next, a vanilla white chocolate mousse is piped in, Viridian Farms blueberries arranged, and then the cocaine. This is assembled a la minute and that is the key.  When a tart of this nature is filled to far before it is meant to be eaten; the crust gets soggy, and faithful readers now that soggy crust is straight bullshit.   So fill your fruit tarts to order or to hell with you.  The recipe below I’ve used for years, is used without permission from one of my most beloved cookbooks: Desserts by Charlie Trotter.

Pate Sucree

4 cups a.p. flour

10 1/2 oz cold butter

1 1/3 cup sugar

2 pinch salt

4 egg yolks (1/3 cup)

1/3 cup heavy cream

Instructions:

• Pie dough method. Cut fat into flour and salt, mix until dough appears granular.  Add remaining ingredients.

• Mix on low speed until dough forms. Don’t over mix.  Chill dough at least one hour before using.

Here’s a little video demonstrating how I roll pate sucree I took with myPhone.  I don’t have a cutter big enough so I use a small bain marie

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s another video showing how to fill the tart shells with dough.  Rolling the dough as thin as possible will create a crisp cookie shell. You kind of guide the dough in with one hand and then drive it into the corners with the other.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You want to bake these shells from frozen or at least thoroughly chilled.  The high fat content will cause the dough to shrink away from your mold and you’ll lose uniform shape.  I also dock the shells with a fork so the bases remain flat.  To reach G.B.D. takes about 12 minutes in a  325 degree convection oven.

We found ourselves perched precariously with too tall speed racks in the back of a pick up.  As the truck’s engine revved ready to pop the curb my mind flashes through this pasts weeks events.  Moving tons of product, slaving mad and crazy hours.  Tarts.  Shit tons of little tartlettes.  Cookies.  Over five hundred; twenty some odd pounds of dough.  White Chocolate Panna Cotta.  Four hundred of them, forty eight at a time.  Cleaning and processing six flats of blueberies. The truck struggling to summit the curb forces me from my reverie, the speed rack tilting, threatening to spill its payload.  Perez and I look at each other, shaking heads.  Wham!! The truck nails a huge rock and we almost lose our shit.  The shits were up on two wheels, I dropped and tucked against our stacks of plates and dug in , gripping.  In that split second I knew I’d lost the load, that I’d blew the mission.  We braced against the rocking and steadied the racks, cussing and kicking and carrying on.  I felt in that instant…peace.  I’d known it was out of my hands, beyond me.  I couldn’t be more prepared for this event than I was.  I had my product, I had my boy, I knew we had this.  Right until it all was about to fly out of the back of this fucking truck, out of my control.  Thankfully, none of that happened.  The truck rocked back level, the speed racks clunked upright.  We rolled silently over the grass to the plating area.  We had a few hours earlier spread the custards out onto about a dozen sheet pans, each on a little square of acetate; easy to slide off onto chilled plates.  They thawed slowly in the fridge for about three hours, and finished perfectly in the spanking afternoon sun.  The entire plating, 275 plates in the end, took about eighteen minutes.  We had so many hands helping, I just poked around, answering questions and pulling fucked up plates off to be replaced with perfect ones. All said and done, we nailed it.  The silky custards were ice cold but not frozen, the compote thick and rich, the simple essence of blueberry.  We retreated from the heat to the cool of our dorm room to pound tall boys and take a nap.  I slumbered happily elated, stoked to be a chef that day.