Guest Post: Autumn Apple Tart

I'm so excited to have a guest post today from fellow blogger and NYU SPI Alum, Caroline Nitz. Caroline runs My Thing of the Day where she posts about fashion, food, and entertainment. After you try this tart, be sure to click over to her site!

Reasons I know that it’s fall: high of 65, leaves crunching under my running shoes, wearing my favorite boots (I’ve missed them!) and finally, apples. Instead of consuming mediocre apples year-round, I usually wait until the autumn months arrive and, quite frankly, go nuts. The harvest from the local Fireside Orchard & Gardens and the handful of trees in my grandparents’ backyard provides more than enough fruit to satisfy my craving. And it’s so worth the wait. Fall in Minnesota is a great time to eat apples. We created the ridiculously tasty Honeycrisp variety back in the 1970s and there are tons of apple orchards around the state where you can pick your own, or just pick up a bag.

Fall also means baking with apples. I love a good apple pie or crisp, but tonight I felt like doing something different. I flipped open Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics and discovered the beautifully simple French Apple Tart recipe. It was delicious. Not too fussy, charmingly rustic and an easy enough recipe that I could manage it, sleepy as I was, on a lazy Sunday evening.

Click below for this great recipe, and more photos!



French Apple Tart (slightly modified from Back to Basics)

For the pastry:
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) cold unsalted butter, diced
½ cup ice water

For the apples:
4 Honeycrisp apples, thinly sliced
½ cup sugar
4 tablespoons (½ stick) cold unsalted butter, small-diced
¼ cup fig jam
2 tablespoons water

For the pastry, place the flour, salt, and sugar in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Pulse for a few seconds to combine. Add the butter and pulse until the butter is in small bits the size of peas. Add the ice water down the feed tube and pulse just until the dough starts to come together. Dump onto plastic wrap and press into a disc. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.

Roll the dough slightly larger than 10 x 14 inches. Using a pizza cutter, trim the edges so they’re straight. Place the dough on the prepared sheet pan and refrigerate while you prepare the apples

Peel the apples and cut them in half through the stem. Remove the stems and cores with a sharp knife. Slice the apples crosswise in ¼-inch-thick slices. Place overlapping slices of apples diagonally down the middle of the tart and continue making diagonal rows on both sides of the first row until the pastry is covered with apple slices.

Sprinkle with the full ½ cup sugar and dot with the butter.

Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the pastry is browned and the edges of the apples start to brown. Rotate the pan once during cooking. Don’t worry if the apple juices start to burn in the pan. When the tart’s done, heat the fig jam together with the water in a saucepan and brush the apples and the pastry completely with the jam mixture. Loosen the tart with a metal spatula so it doesn’t stick to the paper. Allow to cool but definitely serve warm. Et voila!