Ever walk past a French bakery with one of those impossibly elegant apple tarts in the window, the ones with the apple slices fanned out in the shape of a flower? Nothing you could ever make at home, right?
Wrong. It’s so much easier than it looks. That’s because all you really need is the ability to slice an apple paper-thin. And it turns out that there’s a simple trick that allows anyone to do it, even someone without great knife skills. But we’ll get to it in a minute. First, let’s talk tart basics.
The ingredients of a tart are simple: apples, pie dough, sugar, butter and apricot jam. The apples are Golden Delicious, which aren’t my favorite to eat raw, but which turn into a different animal — intense and honeyed — when baked. They also hold their shape beautifully when cooked.
I tried out several variations of the pie dough before settling on this butter-based one as my favorite. No surprise, really. I’ve always preferred the taste of butter to lard or shortening. Yes, those other fats produce a flaky crust, but I found that by going with a high percentage of butter to flour, my butter-based dough was plenty flaky.