Apple Tart

My goal was to use up the apples left from last week's fruit share before picking up more apples for this week. A great deal of what I cook is to use what I have on hand.

So I threw together an apple tart. I already had pie crusts ready. A few weeks ago, I made 6 and put them in the freezer. Then, I can put one in the fridge and use it whenever. (One went to an amazing onion tart last week.)

First - pie crusts. I use butter and lard. BUT, (and that's a big but), my lard is from pastured pig, nearby. I rendered it myself. It seems that a lot of the crap in meat (antibiotics, toxins, whatever) tends to settle in the fat of the animal. This makes it really important nutritionally to use fat of pastured animals. Not to mention myraids of other reasons to do so. Also, I read that lard that you purchase from a grocery store (I actually saw it in Food Lion) has probably been hydrogenated so it will keep better, and that's not good. So, I get fatback, chop it up in my food processor, and warm it in a frying pan til it melts, then strain into a jar, and put in the fridge. It's wonderful pure stuff. It actually has a good bit less saturated fat than butter! And, for cooking at higher temperatures it's good because it has a high smoking point.

Of course you shouldn't eat too much of it. It has a lot of calories. It also has a lot of stuff that's good for you. I'm a believer.

I use good butter too. I might use organic butter, or Homestead Creamery butter (available at the South Main Kroger), or, sometimes, I even use butter I've made myself from my own raw milk. I usually don't have a lot of that, though, and it's so tasty I like putting it on veggies or bread or popcorn.

I use about half butter and half lard for my pie crusts. I give the fats and the flour a few bursts in the food processor, dump the stuff in a bowl, add some ice water and work it just a little with a fork until it can all stick together. Then I take one crusts' worth of dough and make a ball (about softball sized), flatten it just a bit, wrap in plastic, and freeze. (If you want to use it the same day, put in the fridge for an hour.)

So I took my crust which I had put in the fridge the night before, and I rolled the pie crust out with a rolling pin, into a nice big circle. I use one of those silicon mats, which are great. I then flip the whole thing over onto a piece of parchment paper. My life has not been the same since I started using parchment paper.

So I've got this large circle of dough laying on a piece of parchment paper on the counter. There's no pan. I build a tart without a pan. This whole process, by the way, I learned from Alice Waters in the The Art of Simple Food, the book that has had the greatest influence on my cooking.

Today, I mixed about a half cup of peach preserves that a friend made (from local peaches) with a spoonful of orange marmalade, and smeared that mixture on the crust, leaving the outer edge, about an inch and a half, without the preserves on it. Then I arranged the apple slices nicely all over the preserves - in a nice circular pattern. I try to cover all the preserves in a fairly even layer. Then I folded the edges up over the apples.

I slid a cookie sheet under the parchment paper, picked up the whole thing, and slid it into the oven (preheated to 400) onto the stone in there. You could cook it on the pan, but I love the stone. It does a nice job on the bottoms of crusty things. It was probably in there 45 minutes.

It was divine.

You can use any kind of preserves and any kind of fruit. I've made a lot of pear tarts (from local pears I canned) and I've used blueberry preserves. But I think this apple tart was the best ever.