Scaling back a recipe that serves six to eight to a size for just two persons can be tricky. Arithmetically, it’s no problem (a pocket calculator helps) but in practice it doesn’t always work well. I’ve had fairly good luck doing this, but sometimes I’m reminded of the pitfalls. So it was this week, when Tom asked for a Tarte Tatin for dessert.
We both love this tender, caramelized, upside-down apple pastry, though I hadn’t made one in years. I could have made a full-size tart using any of several of my cookbooks, but it’s a dish that isn’t as good leftover as it is freshly made, so I decided to try creating just a tiny one.
I based my experiment on the recipe in Julia Child’s The Way to Cook, which Julia says is her fourth and, as far as she’s concerned, her definitive version of the dish. She calls for a heavy nine-inch frying pan to make a tart serving six. Dusting off my high school algebra again (A=πr2), I calculated that my little six-inch cast iron pan should be the right size for one-third of the recipe. Thus arithmetically fortified, I bravely set to work.
Preparing the apples was the first step. An easy start: One-third of six apples is two apples. I peeled, quartered, and cored them; cut the quarters in half lengthwise; and tossed them in a bowl with sugar and lemon. My apple eighths were my first mistake, as you’ll see in a moment.
Next I had to prepare a caramel syrup. I melted butter in the frying pan, blended in sugar, and stirred until the mixture turned golden brown. That worked all right, though I now think I should have let it get a little darker.
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Off heat, I had to arrange the drained apple pieces on top of the syrup in the pan. Here’s where things got tricky. There wasn’t enough room in it to make the pretty circular design of slices that’s characteristic of a tarte Tatin. I had to just squeeze in my big chunks of fruit wherever they’d fit – heaping the upper layers above the rim of the pan, as Julia said I should, assuring me that they’d sink down as they cooked.
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Well, they didn’t. The next step was to put the pan back on the stove and cook for about 20 minutes, drawing up the juices with a bulb baster and drizzling them over the apples, until they softened and the syrup thickened. My bulky apples stubbornly resisted softening, both uncovered at first, then covered. (The full glory of hindsight now told me I should’ve cut them thinner!) Furthermore, the cover I used wasn’t a tight fit, so juices kept bubbling over and spitting down into the stove.
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Eventually (more like 40 minutes than 20) I called a halt, took the pan off the burner to cool a little, and prepared to roll out a circle of dough for the pastry cover. I’d taken a slab of my leftover dough from the freezer in advance, thinking it was ordinary short-crust pastry dough. As soon as I began to work it, I realized it was actually pasta frolla: maddeningly fragile, frangible stuff. (Ever-ready hindsight now reminded me to always – ALWAYS – label everything.) True to type, the pasta frolla kept breaking apart whenever I tried to lift the sheet of dough. I finally had to roll it between sheets of plastic wrap to keep it together, and then hustle it onto the apples, patching and pasting the edges back together. It wasn’t supposed to look like this:
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In the subsequent baking, the caramel syrup continued to ooze out around the edges of the pan. Fortunately, I was expecting that now, and I’d put a cookie sheet on an oven shelf just below the tart, to catch the drips. By the end, the pastry had crumbled some more, and I nearly despaired.
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The last instruction was to tilt the pan at that point and if the juices were still runny, to put the pan back on the stove and boil them down to a thick syrup. No way I was about to try that maneuver with my little mess of a tart! I just covered the pan with a plate, reversed the two, and lifted off the pan. To my great surprise, aside from being paler than it should have been, the tart didn’t look too bad.
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And in fact, it tasted quite good. Two of us had no trouble eating it all at a sitting. It wasn’t overly sweet – possibly because a fair amount of the caramel syrup had escaped during the cooking – but the apples were sweet enough in themselves. I don’t remember ever having this trouble with full-size tartes Tatin, and even though this time I snatched a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat, I guess I won’t be trying a miniature again.
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Where the Caramel Went
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Postscript: Brooding on those caramel spillages after cleaning them up, I recalculated the math about pan sizes. By golly, I’d gotten it wrong! The area of a nine-inch frying pan is 63.6 square inches, and the area of a six-incher is 28.3 square inches. Ergo, my small one was close to one-half the size of a large one, not only one-third of it, as I somehow originally came up with. (I’m literate, not numerate.)
But here’s the weird thing: That being the case, why couldn’t my more-than-one-third-size pan hold one-third of the recipe’s worth of syrup without dribbling all over the stove and oven? Yes, bigger pans have higher sides, but only proportionately. Beats me!
Ah, the mysteries of math, both theoretical and practical. In spite of your calculations (and I am impressed that you remembered the equation from your school days), the end result looks delicious.
The kind of apples you used Vs. the original can make a big difference too. Some apples will cook down quite a bit and some hardly at all. Generally those that don’t cook down give of the least juice though. Perhaps her pan had higher sides. I have an older 12: cast iron skillet that has sides almost twice as high as the newer ones.
Norma, the Assistant Musicologist, makes a tarte tartin (for two) using pears. I think this is even better than the apple version (at least, hers is). I must remind her that it’s been some time…
Pears sound good. I’d be interested in learning the approximate proportions of Norma’s two-person version, and the size pan she uses, if she be willing to share that information.
Like you, Norma uses a cast iron frying pan for this. The diameter is about twice the length of a pear. She can’t put her hands on it immediately to measure it, she said, and would have to turn the kitchen upside down to find it (that wouldn’t be a pretty sight). She also uses commercial sheets of puff pastry (even my mum eventually started using those).
She quarters the pears length ways and lines the pan with them in a circular pattern, heads to the centre, bottoms to the outside (and fill any gaps). Butter, brown sugar and a sprinkle of cinnamon. Cook a little on the stove to melt the butter and then pastry on top and into the oven (about 200C) for as long as it takes, she said – until the pastry is golden.
That’s about as detailed as it gets, I’m afraid.
That sounds so much easier than messing around with caramel! I’m going to try it. Please thank Norma for me.
First of all, what I love most about your blog is your relentless candor, both verbally and photographically (I guess photos keep you honest). I know I always learn from my mistakes, but now I can learn from yours as well!
Second of all, as Nevin mentioned, what type of apples you use is crucial. I re-read your instructions, and I don’t believe you ever said what you used. I usually do a mix, including Braeburn, and he’s right; some cook down better than others. I can ask Ariel’s mother-in-law, who used to make pies professionally. I have used pears, which are also wonderful; thank you, Peter, for your input!
Finally, all that math made my head spin. I’ve also tried dividing recipes, and often, especially with baking, it just doesn’t work, since there are chemical reactions involved (eeek! math AND chemistry? I’m going back to soups and stews!). But the final tarte looked pretty yummy; out of the jaws of defeat into the mouth of you & Tom. And you are very lucky to have someone who comes up with interesting and challenging food requests.
PS: I am constantly reminding myself to label my freezer bags.
You’re right — I didn’t mention the apple type. Julia recommends Golden Delicious, but what I had in my fruit bowl that day were Fujis, so I used them. Julia did say the right kind of apple is essential, but I blithely ignored that. So one more lesson for us all to learn!
As I was originally trained as a mathematician (and what a useless degree that is), what I should have said was that the radius of the pan was one pear. Thus the area to fill is pi pear squared.
(I’m really sorry about that, but I couldn’t resist it).
Quite so. And then the circumference is two pi pear — though it generally takes more than two pears to fill a pie. (I couldn’t resist either.)