- Hey Bakers, John Kanell from Preppy Kitchen here
and today we're making these amazing fruit tarts.
Perfectly baked formed delicious pastry shells filled
with pastry cream,
the most amazing custard you've ever had in your life,
and of course their topped with fresh fruits,
washed with an apricot brandy glaze
for a little bit of sparkle and deliciousness.
Let's get started!
First off, we're going to make our dreamy pastry cream.
This is custard sent from heaven,
but you need to chill it first,
so, we want to get this done
as soon as possible if not the day before;
day before is fine,
you can do a lot of this prep the day before
and assemble the day of, it'll be really easy.
Start of by taking a vanilla bean,
splitting it length-wise,
and then just scrape out all those amazing and black seeds.
Place that into a saucepan along with two cups of milk,
whole please,
and then heat that over medium heat until it starts
to simmer, like, just about to boil.
Take it off the heat, set it aside,
and we're gonna work on our egg yokes.
Take six egg yolks along with two-thirds of a cup of sugar,
you'd use a little bit more if you wanted,
that's totally up to you,
pinch of salt, and give it a nice whisk.
Whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk,
until it becomes like a light, lemony-yellow color.
Now it's time to sift in a quarter cup of corn starch
and then keep whisking.
Stir, stir, stir, stir, stir;
we're going to have a nice, homogeneous, mixture.
And now, we're going to temper that,
so we're going to add in like half a cup or so
of the hot milk.
Drizzle it in while you whisk.
This is a great time to have a helper
to hold the bowl for you.
After mixture's all tempered,
we're going to slowly drizzle in the rest
of that warm milk while we whisk.
So, whisk, whisk, whisk.
Our goal is not to have scrambled eggs,
just a nice warm egg mixture.
Take the mixture and strain it into a pot.
You can use the same pot but just clean it out first.
It's nice to have no residues or anything lumpy in there.
Take it over a medium heat and whisk.
You're going to whisk until it thickens up.
You'll see a lot of bubbles at first,
the bubbles will start disappearing
and then it'll start thickening unevenly
so, you really have to whisk hard at this point.
You don't want any lumps and you want it
to be nice and evenly cooked.
Once you're mixture is really nice and thick,
take it off the heat,
transfer it to a glass bowl,
cover that bowl with plastic wrap
so the film is touching the custard.
That way, the custard won't develop a skin to it.
And now it's ready to pop into the fridge
for and hour and two or overnight,
you want it to be nice and cool.
To make the tart shell,
I'm using a cup or 226 grams of unsalted butter,
a cup and two-thirds or a 160 grams of confectioner sugar.
I'm adding in a healthy pinch or about a quarter teaspoon
of salt as well as a teaspoon of vanilla extract;
you could also use vanilla bean paste
if you want to be fancy.
I find that by using a more room-temperature butter,
you're mixture is a little bit more homogenous,
but you can use cold butter too
and just whip the heck out of it into a nice paste.
Whip that all up until it becomes a paste at
which point we can start adding in our six egg yolks.
You can just dump them in all at once.
You will have to scrape the bowl down,
I'm warning you ahead of time.
You want this mixture to be perfectly homogeneous.
Once that's all homogeneous,
we're going to add in a pound of flour, 450 grams.
Now we're going to whip it up for like, 40 seconds or so.
You want it to become kind of a shaggy mixture.
Once you're mixture is all nice and shaggy,
we're going to dump it out onto a sheet
of very lightly floured parchment paper
and I want to tell you,
this will be divided into like three batches
to make it manageable,
unless you have parchment paper this big.
This is going to be rolled out to three millimeters
or an eighth of an inch,
and you're going to use one of these guys if you have it.
The rollers with the bumpers come in so handy.
I bought this on vacation as like a lark
and it's become my new favorite roller
even though it is the least physically attractive.
So, roll it out between the two layers of parchment paper
and then pop it into the fridge on a baking sheet.
It needs to cool down
for maybe like half-an-hour to an hour.
You could do it before as well,
like the night before,
just wrap it in plastic or something
so it doesn't dry out in the fridge.
That's important.
I have my chilled dough and look how chilled it is.
That is, (knocking on dough)
nice and cold.
Okay, plop that on there.
This is very important.
Lift the paper off
and I'll actually just very, very lightly, like this,
very lightly flour it.
Put the paper back on
Turn it around.
Bright eyes. (chuckles)
And now,
we'll have a nice surface
that I can remove the pastry from without it sticking.
You don't want it to stick, it warms up immediately.
These are the traditional tart shells
that you probably have it home.
They have a removable piece in the middle
that has been placed someplace else, I'll find it later.
I'm not going to use this.
I just have difficulty with them
and you have to like dock the pastry.
You have to like put the pie weights down.
There's a lot of stuff they want you to do
and it's just a little bit of a hassle.
So, I started using these guys.
These are made by Di vier for the Valrhona Chocolate School
and they are amazing.
They come in lots of different shapes.
Squares, they have lots of circles, they have ovals.
I have all of them.
I started off with just the circles.
I started buying because I was making a bunch
of videos for them.
But they last forever, they're really well made,
and they are so good at making perfect tarts it's crazy.
Let me show you how this works.
So, first of all, just press down.
Okay, look at that.
That's our tart base.
It's not going to leave the ring.
All we have to do is add in the wall and it's so easy.
Take a ruler, cut out a strip,
and then one more cut.
Okay, now, I have my beautiful strip of pastry dough.
I didn't measure this out like I normally do
to find the circumference of the circle,
but we can just eyeball it.
So, we'll have a little bit of extra pastry but that's okay.
Cut the excess off.
You want it to overlap after you press.
Maybe just,
like,
eighth of an inch.
Okay, so, press; this is the key.
All these little perforations here,
you're going to press the pastry dough into them,
like this,
and then press that together like that.
Okay, now we have our almost perfect tart.
What's left?
This excess has to be cut off so, let's do this.
Like that.
So, satisfying. (chuckles)
This is going to go into the freezer now
and once it's frozen,
we can pop it into the oven.
I'll show you a couple things first.
(gasps) Look how beautiful this looks.
The amazing part is it bakes just like this.
There's no puffing, no sagging, it's amazing.
Freezing it is imperative though,
so, this one goes in right away.
I'm going to make a couple of these.
I'll do a square one next.
It's a little bit more challenging, but not too much.
I should have been more strategic
with where I cut my,
cut my dough out.
Okay, the dough's warming up
so I got to be a little bit more careful.
And let's cut another strip out.
I'm going to eyeball it.
All right, perfect strip of pastry.
Now we're going to place this really carefully
because the dough is warming up,
into our tart shell.
For these rings that have ninety degree angles,
you have to really like, mind the corners,
because the dough doesn't naturally want to do that.
(mumbles) Cut the excess off and then just keep pressing.
Press down.
Oh wait, I totally forgot to show you something
for the other one.
Let me show you to it now though.
So, in order to form a bond,
you're going to want to press with your finger
or you can use some kind of a smoothing tool,
and just press the corner.
And that'll cause it to like,
glue itself together during baking.
And you're also going to again,
press the pastry against the wall
so when you do that,
some of the pastry is going into those perforations
and it forms like a little bit of a glue during baking
so it doesn't fall down.
And now we're going to cut this one again.
So, just take a knife and cut the excess so it's flush.
Here we have a square tart also ready
to go into the freezer.
(excited gasp) I'm excited.
This one, you might have
to add like one little hole in the center for steam
to escape.
I'm just warning you ahead of time.
Okay, the other key to baking to baking these,
I'm going to show you right now
while those are in the freezer,
is this guy.
It's a perforated, can you hear me through it?
It's a perforated silicone mat.
I have a link for this as well in the description box.
They come in, again, so handy,
but hard to find on Amazon surprisingly.
The whole point of these is that the air will like,
go under, beneath the mat and bake evenly,
and also allow the steam to escape
so they don't puff as much.
Place your frozen tart shells onto your
perforated silicone mat and pop them into the oven at
320 degrees Fahrenheit
for about 12 to 15 minutes.
It depends on if you want them to be, like,
a little bit under baked, but beautiful and light.
They'll still be crisp.
Or, if you want them to kind of crisp up even more
and get that nice golden color,
remember to check them after like two to three minutes
to see if they're sagging and if they are,
just press the sides in and put them back in.
You'll be fine.
I have a batch that came out of the oven
and cooled down a bit.
I want to show you how satisfying this whole
ring situation is.
So, (excited gasp) take a look at that.
And then, look at this;
look at the sides.
The bottom has that nice texture like a bakery would have,
now I know their secrets.
And you can see, like, the inside is like perfectly formed.
This is a great tart shell.
I'm so excited for this process.
The other ones came out nicely too;
little rectangular ones as well I made off camera.
All right, I'm going to set these aside.
My pastry cream is cool now too,
so, let's give that a whip and get to assembling.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. (high-pitched ringing)
What do we have to do first? (chuckles)
We have to make our glaze for all the fruits.
For that glaze,
I have half a cup of apricot preserves in a little bowl,
adding a tablespoon of water to thin it out
and a tablespoon of brandy to make it interesting.
Tablespoon and a blessing.
All right, so we're going to microwave those
and just get it warm and then mix it up and strain it,
because there are some apricot pieces in there.
Oo, it's really hot. Really hot!
Finish straining.
This'll be perfect for brushing onto my fruits.
Smells amazing and the last thing before assembly
is this pastry cream.
I made this batch last night.
Plastic off.
And you can see it really holds it's shape.
Too much to pipe, so, we're going to whisk it up just
to like, kind of, you know, smooth things out,
calm it down a bit, make it more pipe-able.
You don't want to pipe the hot pastry in there though
because the steam will like, make the pastry soggy.
(stirring)
Okay, that is much smoother now
so I can pipe it, fill it, it'll be really nice.
Start off by piping a layer
of custard onto your cooled tart shells.
Then arrange various slices of fruits.
I'm using some preserved peaches.
I love the color and the flavor is actually really nice.
Strawberries, kiwi slices,
blackberries, raspberries, the works!
You can arrange this in any kind of pattern you want.
Do a mishmash all one kind of fruit or a variety
for that beautiful composition like you'd see in a bakery.
Once you're tart shells are filled with fruit,
you're going to give them a nice brushing
of that apricot jam.
This will seal all of the color in,
the flavors,
and they won't whither away right away in
the fridge if you're going to serve them later.
You can add a little sprig of mint
for a touch of green if you want to
and their ready to enjoy!
I have been looking forward to making this
and eating it forever!
I used to go to these like, little cafés in Westwood,
UCLA is where I went to school,
and they would have these fresh tarts,
but they were not that fresh,
but they were still good.
So now I get to have the freshest of fresh tarts just
for me with impressed ingredients, no preservatives.
Let's get this bitten.
(eating)
The pastry cream is so gentle.
Custardy, just the right amount of vanilla.
I'm in a daze; "tartmatized." (chuckles)
Thanks so much for watching,
I hope you like my videos.
You can hit that like button and subscribe if you do.
If you like this video,
check out my German chocolate cake tutorial.
That cake is mind-blowingly delicious
and you will eat way more than you're supposed to
and feel sick, but it'll be okay because it was so good.
Or, check out my how to make pastry creme tutorial
for the full A to Z;
every little detail you want
to know about making pastry cream.
So versatile and delicious.
All right, thanks so much for watching
and I'll see you soon!