Anger Burger

The Anger Burger kitchen has been a barren place, lately.  There’s not a good explanation, I’m just going through one of those crackers-for-dinner streaks where nothing seems worth doing dishes for.  This might on the surface appear as depression, but it’s more of a nervous aimlessness – that, and it turns out that “eating sugar” and “being motivated” were one in the same.   Whoops!

However, I did remember that I had made an apple tart at Thanksgiving and forgot all about it.  I didn’t even think I’d remembered to photograph it, but digging back through Lightroom unearthed a single, grainy shot:

It’s Ina Garten’s French Apple Tart though really, between us little birds, it’s just a pie without a lid.  Really!  The bottom crust is a basic butter-based pie crust, on top of which you layer thinly sliced apple in whatever obsessive-compulsive pattern you can achieve, top with sugar and butter, bake, and ta-da, a pie without a lid.

Overall, it was delicious, though any time you might have saved is totally lost in the time it takes to thinly slice the apples by hand and then carefully layer them into the pastry.  Still, I liked it in large part because it was so thin and because the lack of lid allowed for more of a reduction of the liquids, resulting in a kind of apple pie concentrate.

Now, some tips: Google the recipe and you’ll find some questionable-looking versions out there, which I’m aware sounds profoundly snooty and in fact is, but let’s get serious: you’re making this to impress people, even if only yourself.

• The thinner you slice the apples, the better it will look.  The problem here is that the thinner you slice them, the thinner the tart itself will be as well, and to counter that you’re actually looking at two layers of apple here, but the bottom one made no effort to look nice.  I just quickly packed in about 1/2 the apples and made them as flat as possible, and then came the fancy layer.  This also, if I recall, required one or two more apples than she called for, but since I always buy more than I need it was fine.

• Her recipe calls for 1/2 a stick of butter cut into small pieces and put over the apples to bake into them during cooking, and for my money that is way too much butter.  It’s not even gluttonous, it’s just an oil slick.  I think you can get away with the equivalent of a 1/4 stick of butter, or just a few pieces pinched off and dropped on top.

• I drizzled over about 1/4 cup of boiled cider before baking, because I’m totally obsessed with this stuff.  You know how in The Dark Crystal the Skeksis use the power of the crystal to steal the life essence from Podlings and then drink it?  I think that’s what they did to the apples that went into my bottle of boiled cider.

• Ina’s original recipe calls for the pastry to be laid flat on a baking sheet and then layered with apples, which would also work just great, though she advises that it’s alright if and when the juices all leak out and burn.  I think that losing the juices is a incomprehensible tragedy and recommend instead that you use a large tart pan and form the pastry carefully all the way up the sides.

So there you go.  A totally fussy tart that is worth the trouble if you’re showing off, but probably not if you’re going to eat it all yourself at home while watching old seasons of Supernatural on DVD.  Mmm, Winchester boys¹.

¹ Actually I’m just a Dean girl myself. Sam is, well, how should we put this: there’s a reason we call the show Shmoopernatural. Someone’s shmoopy and needs a hug.