I'm working through Ferrandi's pastry book (French Patisserie) and I have some questions about their Tarte Tatin.
A big difference compared to pretty much evey other recipe I've seen is that the pastry (full puff) is cooked in a tart ring and set aside. The instruction is very simply "line the tart tin", the technique for which is given several pages back. The apple filling is cooked in several stages before a final bake in a tarte tatin pan and then inverted into the pastry after it's chilled. The filling asks for a light caramel (to line the pan) and a caramel cream which is used to coat the apples and pre-baked. So three bouts in the oven total. This is similar to their level 2 and 3 recipes which cook the pastry and apples separately.
Using a tart tin would normally give very straight and smooth sides, such as with a short crust. The photo on the other hand looks like they made a big vol-au-vent as the sides have very distinct horizontal ridges:
I've not been able to find a single comparable recipe. I'm curious if this is deliberately cheffy or if there's some logic behind the separation. The recipes with numbered levels tend to be like this and require a lot of interpretation (very "rest of the f-ing owl"). Maybe easier for batch baking? As you could prepare a large quantity of both apple mix and pie crusts. But that doesn't seem easier than filling a dish and then using a disc of pastry on top.
Is there any way to achieve this as they describe with a tart ring?
EDIT: I went with a rough puff disc + annulus on top, but like a vol-au-vent puffed much higher than the example in the photo. Perhaps fewer turns? The par-baked apples were also good (would do that again), not mushy at all and with a dry skin which helped assembly. However, the caramel cream coating seemed to do absolutely nothing that a dredge in sugar wouldn't have achieved and most of it dribbled and pooled under the Silpat. I scooped it up and poured what was left over the tart before the final bake. One mistake I made is that the apples should probably be cut in half horizontally and then into 4, not vertically. This would have given chunkier pieces and taller filling.
It's quite hard to judge from the photo whether they also might have baked a disk millfeuille style with a sheet on top to prevent a hard rise. The perspective makes it hard to see if the pastry case has walls, or if it's a flat disk. I don't own a tart ring, but I might get one and experiment to see if I can replicate.
