That is beautiful! – Massimo Bottura
Kind words considering the mess in front of me…and the wasted hours behind me.
Maybe I should explain what the original intention here was.
As part of my recent obsession with thepastrydepartment.com, I was planning on trial running a pastry recipe for a lemon tart. Specifically, a recipe for making a pure lard tart case. The idea being that lard, at 100% fat would produce a pastry more tender than any butter case ever could ( since butter’s nearer to 80% fat) .
Thus I set off on my ill-fated foray into lardy tarts.
The problem with restaurants and Michelin stars.
One thing to remember about restaurant recipes, is that they’re always built for bulk. They don’t always scale well, especially for the volumes used in home baking. This I completely ignored in my glee at discovering an archive of professional pastry recipes. Luckily, this pastry would soon remind me that despite their pedigree, these recipes are not always perfect.
Things started off well. The food processor cut my lard into the flour nicely. Achieved the ‘couscous’ like texture I was apparently after. Then came the water works. I splashed in the bare minimum amount of water needed according to the recipe instructions. It completely obliterated my pastry dough. Pastry should always be pliable, but this dough was completely unworkable. Over-hydrated and sticky, I attempted to salvage the dough by pulsing more flour into it, the deadly sin of pastry making.
I ended up with a workable, but questionably viable dough.
Despite my misgivings, the show had to go on so into the fridge before being rolled, re-chilled and blind baked (weighed down with a generous amount of sugar). As the tart case emerged from the oven though, it appeared…well, to be OK! No idea how of course since measurements had long gone out the window, but the pastry held. One successful tart crust.
That’s what I thought.
Recreating imperfection
On I went, happy as can be, prepping the curd to fill the lemon tart. The tart shell cooling off as I went. Then, once the curd was all set, I slowly, but surely, shimmied the tart free. Lifting it out by the spring-form base, without issues.
“That’s it! Done!”
Nothing left to do now but move the tart off the base and we’re good to…oh.
It collapsed. Shards of tart case all over the table.
Clearly the recipe author, Dana Cree, wasn’t lying when she said it’d be tender. It was tender. So tender in fact that it couldn’t even support it’s own weight without crumbling to pieces. So eager to ‘melt in the mouth’ that it couldn’t even wait long enough to get there!
Bloody pastry.
Not exactly the ending I was looking for (and not just because my showpiece lemon tart was in pieces). No, I needed closure, a more mature evaluation of the situation than scraping it into a bin and deleting the footage . There was a story to be made of this, and a lesson to be gleaned from it.
With the pastry still tasty and the curd still warm, I decided to take a leaf from Massimo Bottura’s book, to recreate Oops I Dropped the Lemon Tart. I therefore present to you, a dropped lemon tart.
Evaluation
This is therefore what became of my original lardy recipe review. The creation of one of my favourite videos to date. Tender lard pastry, strewn across the table, with smatterings of curd over everything. This is probably the most fun I’ve had with a video in a long while, and despite the cleanup, is a format I’d be tempted to do again!
So bottom line, here’s what I learnt from this recipe:
- Don’t follow a recipe adapted from mass catering too closely. Ingredients won’t ever scale perfectly.
- Lard in a pastry tastes good, but there will always be room for butter (although Nain, my grandmother, might disagree)
- Failure in baking is a lot of fun, especially these days. Stop chasing perfection.
And that’s why there’s always a reason, to drop the lemon tart.
More to Read
Yes, this tart was a mess, but if you want a tart that did come out as expected, take a look at our Inverse Apple Crumble. Or, if you liked the look of my smatterings, give the lemon curd a go, I promise it’ll work (although there’s a story to that one too).
Update
As an update to this piece, I’ve had another crack at this recipe, this time omitting the water completely. The results were not much better. In fact they were worse if anything. I attempted to make smaller lemon tarts in a muffin tray using pastry that was nothing bu lard, flour, sugar and salt. They were again baked blind before being filled with curd and returned to the oven to finish.
They were awful. The pastry would crumble at the slightest of touches. I had no chance of removing them from their trays without mashing them into a grainy, lemony pulp. The small portion of pastry I did manage to taste was coarse and grainy with a taste saltier than it had any right being. Clearly there’s a limit to the amount of fat you can force into flour before flaky dreams become a greasy, sandy nightmare.