Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Lemon Tart


Today we finished our Lemon Tarts. I think they turned out pretty well. I made the tart with Pate Sablee Dough and Lemon Cream, while Carlos made his with Lemon Curd and Sweet Dough.

We had a little drama today when we went to the cooler to retrieve our Chocolate Tart dough and discovered that it was missing. Later I saw another table's Lemon Tart on our rack, so I have to assume that they innocently were using the wrong rack when they took our dough. No bid deal. Chef John gave us some extra dough for us to use.

We also put in 4 turns on our Inverted Puff Pastry. For those who may not know what inverted Puff Pastry is, it's pretty much what it sounds like. To better explain Inverted Puff Pastry, let me take a quick moment to describe normal Puff Pastry.

In normal puff pastry, you make a dough and wrap it around a slab of butter. This is then rolled out so that it is 3 times as long as it is wide, such as 7" X 21". Fold the top 1/3 of the dough over onto itself, then fold the bottom 1/3 up over that, so that it is folded into thirds, much like a letter. At this point you'll have a dough that is about 7"X7". This is called a "turn". Once the dough is turned, there are several layers of dough (D) and butter (B), so that it is kind of like DBDDBDDBD. Turn the dough 1/4 turn clockwise so that the "opening of the letter" is to your right, and repeat the process of rolling the dough to 7"X21", then fold it onto itself in thirds again. At this point you've completed 2 turns. In doing so, you've not just doubled your layers of DBDDBDDBD, but you've raised the levels exponentially to something like DBDDBDDBDDBDDBDDBDDBDDBDDBDD. Classic Puff Pastry has 6 turns, which in the end gives you about 1600 very thin layers of DBD, which gives you the dramatic puff when baked.

Anyway, Inverted Puff Pastry starts with butter wrapped around the dough, rather than dough wrapped around the butter. Yes, you read that correctly, you wrap the butter around the dough. Sound messy? It is. But after getting 1-2 turns in your dough, it becomes more manageable.

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