Brown butter, apple & hazelnut tart

Serves 10-12

Equipment: 25 cm fluted tart tin with a removable base

Ingredients:

Pastry:

150 g unsalted butter, room temperature & soft but not melted

35 g soft brown sugar

35 g white (granulated) sugar

50 g honey

250 g plain (all-purpose) flour

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

Tart:

6-8 apples, peeled, cored and sliced thinly (soft baking apple preferably like Braeburn, honey gold, gala, pink lady, Fuji etc.)

2 Tablespoons sugar

1 cup hazelnuts, roughly chopped

Brown butter filling:

2 eggs

100g sugar

50g plain flour

125g brown butter

Pinch of salt

1 tsp. vanilla bean paste

 To serve: vanilla flavoured whipped cream

Method:

Preheat your oven to 175C conventional.

First make your pastry. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine the butter and sugars on low, stopping and scraping down the bowl with a spatula as needed. You are not trying to aerate here, so this will happen in about 30 seconds. Add in the honey and mix to combine. 

Mix the flour and salt together in a separate bowl.

Add the flour mix to the stand mixer and bring the dough together over a low–medium speed, stopping and scraping the bowl as needed to bring it together evenly.

Scoop the dough onto a large sheet of baking paper laid out on your bench and cover it with a second sheet of baking paper. Use a rolling pin to roll your dough to a thickness of 3-4 mm very, very thin! If your dough is too soft, making it difficult to roll evenly, place it in the fridge for 15 minutes to firm up slightly then continue to roll. Place the rolled sheet of dough in the fridge for 10 minutes to chill. 

Remove the top sheet of baking paper and proceed to peel off as much of the pastry in one piece as you can from bottom sheet. Lay the pastry into your fluted tart tin. It will tear and break into pieces, but you can patch that up and puzzle it back together in the tin as you go.

The important thing here is to take your time. This is the longest step in the process, but the resulting super thin, crisp shell is a thing of beauty. You’ll have excess dough that we’ll use later to patch any cracks that appear while baking (any excess beyond that can be shaped into a disk, wrapped and frozen for a few smaller tarts another day). Press the dough into the fluted edges and trim the edges so they are flush with the edge of the tin.

Place a sheet of baking paper or aluminium foil directly on top of the dough and fill with pie weights.

Bake for 35 minutes, then carefully remove the foil and pie weights. Use the scrap dough to patch up any cracks that have appeared (there may not be any). Bake for a further 10–15 minutes, until the base is completely and evenly golden. Remove the pastry from the oven and leave it to cool in the tin before you proceed to fill it.

 While your pastry bakes uncovered, place your apples on a parchment lined sheet tray, keeping the 1/4s together as best you can. Sprinkle them with the 2 tablespoons of sugar and bake them alongside the pastry (10-15 minutes) to begin to soften them a bit before layering into the pastry.

To make the brown butter filling, set up a stand mixer fitted with a whip attachment and add the eggs and the sugar and whip until light, quadrupled in volume and pale yellow in colour.  Add in the flour, salt, and vanilla and whip again until incorporated.  Slowly stream in the cooled (or slightly warm) brown butter while the machine whips on high.

Place your partly cooked apples into the tart shell and spoon all of the brown butter topping over the apples.  Sprinkle the hazelnuts around the edge and bake for 45-55 minutes until the top is golden and beginning to crack.  Remove it from the oven and allow it to cool for at least 20 minutes.  Cut into wedges and serve with vanilla whipped cream.

Note: to make a vanilla whipped cream, combine 200 ml pure cream with 200g crème fraiche with a pinch of salt and 2 teaspoons of vanilla bean paste and whip using a stand mixer or hand beaters until light, glossy and spoonable.  Add 3-4 tablespoons of sifted icing sugar if you want it sweetened but I prefer unsweetened.