Recipe: Lemon Tartlets

You may not know this, but dessert lovers are divided into two categories. Those who love lemon and those who love chocolate. And for you lemon lovers, this lesson is for you. We are going to make luscious lemon tartlets. First, we're going to make a sweet tart dough using the cut in method.

Then we're gonna move on to lemon curd and we're gonna finish with Italian meringue. And at the end of all of it, when our tartlets are assembled, we're gonna use a creme brulee torch and burn the sugar and caramelize them. So they're just going to look perfect, gorgeous, ready to go. The first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna sift our dry ingredients. So I have all purpose flour, sugar, and fine sea salt.

It's a little less messy sometimes if you sift on parchment paper, then you don't have to aim for your bowl. So there we go. Alrighty. And then once you're sifted, you're gonna dump this right into your mixing bowl and you wanna make sure that it's fairly good size and you have good surface area because we're gonna get in there with our tools and our hands and work this dough. So it's important that it's not super small, should be at least 8, 10 inches in diameter.

Alrighty, now that's done. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna combine my egg yolks, my water and my vanilla. This dough is actually more in the pate brisee category and brisee means broken dough or broken en France. And in a moment, you'll see why they call this dough broken. So I'm just gonna take my little whisk and mix this up just to combine.

There's no need to aerate this. You don't wanna whip in a lot of air just to combine the ingredients. All right so recipe recap, I have my flour, sugar and salt sifted and placed into my nice wide mixing bowl. And in this bowl I've combined my egg yolk, my water and my vanilla. My butter is cubed up and it's nice and cold.

Whenever we do a cut in dough, it's really important that the fat is cold. So you can cube it up and throw it in the fridge or even in the freezer for a few minutes. If you feel that it's softening up, we want the fat to sort of cut in or shingle for a better word against the flower particles. If your butter's too soft, they're just gonna grease and coat the flower particles. Now for the next thing, you have a choice of tools.

This is a pastry blender, and you may have one in your pastry cupboard or your pastry drawer. This is a perfectly fine tool to use or a bowl scraper. This also works. What I wanna avoid is getting my hands in there. Butter melts at about anywhere between 86 and 90 degrees.

And I'm 98.6. I think I'm hoping I'm 98.6. So if I get my hands in there, I'm gonna melt my butter. So I wanna avoid that. So that's why one of these two tools is what you wanna use.

With a chopping motion, I'm just gonna go in and chop up my butter until it looks like coarse meal. This is not flaky pie dough. This is more like a mealy pie dough where the fat particles are considerably smaller because the reason I'm choosing this dough is our filling is quite liquid. So I wanna make sure that my dough has a pretty tight matrix. Kind of an odd word for dough structure maybe is better.

Actually, I'm gonna switch out tools so you guys can see how this one works. So again, I'm mixing and you have to get the excess off the pastry blender. So I'm mixing this until it looks like coarse meal. The butter particles should be really no bigger than a grain of rice. I am so excited to be teaching you guys this dough because it comes together beautifully and it's really, really sturdy.

You're going to love it. This is going to become your go-to sweet tart pastry dough. All right. So looking at this, you don't see any large visible chunks of butter. The butter looks, as I said, just a few seconds ago, no bigger than grains of rice and the flour particles look quite moistened.

And that's absolutely correct for this type of dough. Remember, we're not making flaky pie dough, we're making a sweet tart crust. All right. So now I'm going to add my liquid and I'm just gonna dump it for want of a better word on top of my butter and flour mixture. And now this is the tool of choice.

I'm going to use the bowl scraper, and I'm going to literally mash and fold the liquid through the flour and butter mixture. I'm working in that moisture. And you can see that it's really important that I pre-mixed my liquid ingredients so that we wouldn't have any specks of bright yellow egg yolk, 'cause that's not what we want either. And periodically, at least once in your working of the dough, you have to remove the dough that sticks to the bowl scraper. So now what I'm doing is I'm mashing the whole thing into the bottom of the bowl.

And what you really, really wanna watch is dumping this mixture out until your work surface too early, because the bowl keeps it contained. And sometimes if we dump out a dough like this too early, we end up with a mess and it's really frustrating. So let your bowl do the work for you. All right. So I'm gonna hold onto this dough.

Now I'm just going to basically smooth the dough with the heel of my hand. And I'm employing a French technique called fraisage. I use the heel of my hand because it's the coldest part of my hand. And it's basically 1, 2, 3, a little bit of mashing down on top, getting any stray dough in there, just corralling the dough, the edges for want of a better word. And I'm gonna give it one fold, two folds.

So now I'm gonna go ahead, dough is nice and organized. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap it and put it in the refrigerator and while it's chilling. And remember that's a minimum of two hours for the dough to chill. We want the fat to firm up again and the flour particles to hydrate. So minimum of two hours, and while the dough is chilling, we're gonna go ahead and make our luscious lemon curd.

So I'm gonna just stick this in the fridge. We have an optional ingredient in our lemon curd and that's gelatin and what the gelatin does for our lemon curd is it stabilizes a little bit, so it's easier to serve to plate your tart and definitely easier for you or your guests to eat. As I said, though, it's optional so if you don't wanna use it, just omit it, but I wanna talk about it first. We have two types of gelatin available. The most commonly available is Knox Gelatine, and it's the powder gelatin and powdered gelatin needs to be hydrated.

It's always comes in it's dry form. It needs to be hydrated in five times its weight in water. So here I have my gelatin and then five times the water and the best thing to do when you're working with it is to sprinkle, slowly sprinkle your gelatin powder over your water. And what will happen is this is just going to congeal in a couple of minutes. It'll just kind of become a solid mass.

It looks a little strange, but it's perfectly correct. Now some of you may have easy access to leaf gelatin and these two products are pretty much exactly the same. They perform the same function in the recipe, but this gelatin gets hydrated or bloomed. That's actually the professional term for it in cold water. And it takes about 10 minutes to bloom leaf gelatin.

I have some here in cold water and after about 10 minutes, it gets really soft and rubbery and that's perfectly correct as well. And that can just sit there while we go ahead and make our lemon curd. One more note about gelatin, gelatin in any form, whether it's leaf or whether it's powder is bloomed or hydrated in cold liquid. I can't stress that enough because if your liquid isn't cold enough, your gelatin will just disintegrate and get very stringy and weird, so make sure your liquid is cold. And if you want, can go ahead, throw a couple ice cubes in your water just to make sure that it's cold.

Now we're gonna go ahead and actually make our lemon curd. Now some of you may be veteran lemon curd makers, and oftentimes when you have a recipe for lemon curd, it's recommended that you use a double boiler. That technique is great, but it takes a long time. So I'm gonna teach you guys how to make lemon curd over direct heat. All right.

So here's my me and plus I have my lemon juice, my sugar, egg yolks, egg, lemon zest and butter. So starting lemon juice, eggs. I like to mix my lemon juice and eggs together before I add my sugar because I can get them nicely mixed and the heat is off. See, no fire. Go ahead and mix.

It seems if you mix the lemon juice and egg yolks, first, it breaks up the egg white. It's not as stringy. Now, once you have this mixed, I'm gonna go ahead and add my sugar. As soon as I'm satisfied that it's smooth enough, I don't wanna add a lot of excess air. I'm just combining.

Okay. And now I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna turn it on low heat. And all we're doing is gently coagulating the egg, and there's a couple of really clear rules about lemon curd. Number one, you want to always be stirring. So using the whisk straight up and down like a spoon, I just mix.

I just stir away. Not whisking, not aggressively adding air, just stirring. Now there are real clear clues with lemon curd and the same principles actually apply to creme Anglaise and Zabaglione for you serious dessert makers. So you can apply these rules to those dessert preparations as well. Number one, it should never boil.

If you feel it's coming up to the boil and you see little bubbles coming off the edges, you pull it off the heat. That's the reason we keep the heat low. The other thing is that any foam that you may have created in mixing your lemon juice, your egg yolks and your sugar will start to dissipate and last but not least steam will waft off the surface. If we were going to take a temperature of our finished lemon curd, that temperature would be 180 degrees, but we're not going to do that. And I notice that my lemon zest also needs to go in.

So don't forget that. Also I have a bowl and a strainer set up because lemon curd must be strained. Now at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and change to my spatula. There's no need to whisk anymore. My lemon curd is really, really close and I'm gonna stop for a moment.

I don't want you guys to stop, but I'm gonna stop. And I want you to see the foam, that little layer of foam right here as the lemon curd begins to thicken and the egg protein begins, the egg yolk and the egg begins to coagulate that is going to dissipate. So that's a major clue. The other there's actually more tests when it's thick enough, it will coat your spatula and you can run your finger through the liquid and the sides should not go together. The lemon curd has begun to thicken up quite a little bit and you can see the little bits of white on the surface are actually the parts of the egg called the chalaza and that holds the yolk and white together.

So once you see that, you know you're close, we have never, ever boiled. And I also like to look at the bottom of the pot. There should be a film at the bottom of the pot and the two sides are not moving. So our lemon curd is done and I'll show you that on the spatula. So either checking the bottom of your pot or drawing a finger through some of the lemon curd that you put on your spatula or your wooden spoon is great.

So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and strain it. I'm gonna use my spatula, press, press the mixture through. And just to recap, here's our little bit of coagulated egg white protein. We've strained out our lemon zest because we really don't wanna eat that. It's not very pleasant and there's little bits of the chalaza in there.

So that's done. And now what we're going to do is we're going to add our gelatin. This is exactly what the bloomed powdered gelatin looks like. And while your lemon curd is still nice and hot, the gelatin's going to go in. And stir that up and you can see that instantly dissolves.

And now I'm gonna go ahead and mix in my butter. My butter is softened. It's been sitting out for a while, so it's gonna mix in really nicely. And then what we're gonna do is this is going to go in the refrigerator to set up and chill. You can make your lemon curd up to three days ahead.

Just keep it in the refrigerator. The consistency is going to be nice and soft, but still plateable and serveble. If we were using our leaf gelatin, it would've gone in at exactly the same point as the powdered. Let me just get these butter bits mixed in and I'll show you how to handle the leaf gelatin. Okay.

Oops. All right. So if you're using the leaf gelatin and it's been hydrating in the cold water for quite a while, it's nice and soft. Before you add it to your hot lemon curd, you need to squeeze out the excess water. You can also put this in a small strainer and with the heel of your hand, press out the excess water.

All right, that's all you need to do. I usually just squeeze it in my hand. And then at the same point that I had added the powder gelatin, this gelatin would go in. So it's basically a one for one substitution. There's no changes there.

Now we wanna get our lemon curd cold. So it's going to go over an ice bath. Now we're gonna go ahead and cover the lemon curd with plastic wrap. And before we put it in the fridge, we're gonna keep it over the ice water bath. So it gets nice and cold.

I've just taken my dough out of the refrigerator. Remember it needs to chill for a minimum of two hours. And now I'm gonna go ahead and roll it out. Then it's gonna chill again for about another half hour. And I'll explain why.

And shortly here we have a variety of tart pans and it depends on what you wanna do. You can make them big. You can make them teeny tiny. What I'm gonna do for class as I'm gonna use this size and this size. I want you to see how the dough goes into a fluted mold and then how it goes into a smooth sided mold.

Now very important for tarts. The pan is never greased. All right. So just naked and unadorned, no spray, no butter, nothing. Okay let's get started.

So obviously I don't need all this dough right now. So I'm just gonna use a small portion. And over here I have some all-purpose flour to use as my work surface flour. And the other thing I have is I have a set of cutters. Now this makes it really quite simple for tartlets.

I'm just gonna find the cutter. That is a little bit bigger than my tartlets shell. So we're gonna put that there. When we roll out dough, we pound first and I just add a little bit of flour. You want to make sure that the dough doesn't stick, it needs to be moving and I'm gonna roll it out to one eighth of an inch.

Okay? If it sticks, you can go ahead and use an offset spatula, slide underneath it and getting, get it moving again. You don't have to despair. So now that I have it almost there, then I'm gonna roll back and forth. That looks good.

Tartlets and tarts are definitely thinner than pies. We want a little bit more of a delicate edge, and now I'm gonna go ahead and grab my cutter. And this cutter is not dirty. What I do, I learned this trick many years ago, my cutters, I put a layer of corn starch in the bottom of the tin and it absorbs excess moisture. So if these were ever put away wet, they would not be ruined.

So I just tap 'em, tap out the excess corn starch and I start cutting. And you wanna make sure with these cutters that they are really nice and dry when you put them away and they'll last a lifetime. All right. So now I have my circle of dough and I'm just gonna plop that in there. All right.

I'll plop this one in here too. And what you're gonna do, you need your flour handy and you're just going to form the dough to the pan, bringing it up to the top. And then we have two options for small tartlets. I just flick it away with my thumb. You can also get that out of the way.

If you have a smaller rolling pin, this is the smallest tartlet and the largest rolling pin. But if you have a smaller rolling pin, you can roll back and forth and your excess dough will be cut away. It's up to you, whatever you like. Now, this little guy, we are going to do the same thing, but it's going to be a smooth edge. And the lovely thing about this dough, this dough took about 15 tests to get to where I wanted it to be.

It's really sturdy. And what I mean by sturdy is that when we go to bake it, it is not going to shrink down the sides of the little tartlet pan. So that's really quite wonderful when you are making tarts, 'cause that can be a problem. So I have a fluted one, I have a smooth one. And the very last thing I'm going to show you with this particular dough.

Here's my little scraps. You can actually, if the dough is warming up and giving you problems or you're just having a bad rolling out dough day, you can press it here. I'm gonna do this one. It's a little bit more difficult. You can press it into the tartlet pan.

And that really is great, 'cause there's just those days when it's warm in your kitchen and this is a soft dough, it has the egg yolks in it. So it's a little bit more tender and all that butter and sugar in it. So it's definitely a tender dough. So it's really great that we can do this and what I'm doing, you guys can see I'm pressing against the side of the pan. You wanna make sure that the black or the metal is not really showing through very much.

I'm getting rid of my excess. Get that out of the way. And then just press once again up the sides, try to get a 90 degree angle between the bottom of the tartlet mold and the side of the pan. That's not too shabby. And if you have a bare spot, you can see here.

I'm gonna make one. There you go. You have a little bare spot there. Don't panic. You can take a piece of dough and just patch that in and everything is going to be just fine.

All right. So now I'm going to show you generally with tarts. You see this in the French pastry classics. We line them with baking beans and bake them either all the way or part of the way before we finish our tartlets. Now our lemon curd is already cooked and our Italian meringue is going to be cooked.

So our tartlet shells for this item need to be fully baked. So what we're gonna do is for the little shallow ones, I'm just going to prick them with a fork. I'm not going to line them at all. And I'll do that with a fluted one. And this dough, this little miracle dough will hold up and not shrink down during baking.

Now this little guy I'm gonna to take a small square of parchment paper that I cut from a larger piece and I'm gonna scrunch it up. And I'm gonna open it up and I'm gonna scrunch it up again. I want it nice and scrunched up so that it will conform to the sides of this little tartlet pan. And then I'm gonna fill this up with beans. Okay, here we go.

Make sure all the flatten, the beans out. So either way this will work. You can either dock the little tartlets shell with a fork or you can, if you're worried about it, you can line them with baking beans. These beans we use exclusively as pie weights. Once you they're just little black beans and they're perfect for tartlets once they're cool, put 'em in a container, you can use them over and over again and now what's gonna happen.

These, unfortunately, if it were a perfect world, we could put 'em right in the oven, but we can't. We need to chill them first. Now I'm gonna put these in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes. You can go ahead. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

And after 30 minutes, when they're nice and cold, we're gonna bake them for approximately 12 to 15 minutes. Now I've assembled the components for our lemon meringue tartlets. We have our fully baked tartlet shells. Look at that beautiful color, light golden brown. They look just great.

Our lemon curd has chilled and as it chills, it thickens up and will come back to that in just a moment. But that's how it's gonna look when you take it out of the fridge. And now I'm gonna go ahead and make our Italian meringue. I have my egg whites, which are actually gonna go over to the mixer and we're gonna start. You wanna use a tall, straight sided sauce pan where you put water in first, then I'm gonna pour in my sugar.

And the other ingredient I have is corn syrup, light corn syrup. And we're gonna scrape that in. And this mixture should have the consistency of wet sand at the beach, but I really don't wanna stir it or agitate it very much. And my heat is off. Just gonna kind of poke at it.

If it looks dry, you can splash in a little bit more water. That's fine, but not too much because the more water you add, the more you have to boil off. So now I'm gonna go ahead and turn on my flame to medium, just wet these little last bits of sugar. And the one thing I wanna avoid is throwing up a lot of sugar up the side of the pot. That's sometimes where you'll see pastry chefs washing down the side of sugar pots.

They're cooking sugar in with water, but I really don't wanna add any more water to my sugar. And sometimes we don't always know where our pastry brush has been. So if you follow the technique of water, sugar, corn syrup to wet sand consistency, you'll probably always have excellent results. We're gonna bring this up to the boil and the sugar is going to dissolve and it's going to become nice and clear. And this process takes a couple of minutes.

And remember, we're gonna test for 240 degree sugar. So that is technically, some of you may have heard the term soft ball. Once your sugar has liquified and it's coming up to a nice rolling boil, this is when our egg whites are going to go into our mixer because what we're doing when we're making our meringue is we're gonna throw, pour our hot sugar syrup into moving egg whites, thereby our cooking the egg whites. So they'll be perfectly safe. So once again, recipe recap, my sugar is boiling.

My egg whites are in the mixer, fitted with the whisk attachment and I'm on medium speed. Now I can see that by the size of my bubbles, my sugar is getting up to temperature and yes, you can use a thermometer, but I'm going to show you a really cool trick, take a large metal paper clip, dip it in your sugar. And when you can blow a bubble, your sugar is at 240 degrees Fahrenheit. Now over here. And remember the pot is hot.

Everything's hot lock the lip of the pot to the lip of the mixer bowl and pour in a steady stream. Try not to hit the whisk, pour right between the whisk and the bowl. Get all of it in there. There we go. And now I'm gonna turn this up to high speed, but when you turn the mixer up to high speed, I want you to stand back a little bit in case any splashes out of the mixer bowl.

And remember when we work with hot sugar, clear the kitchen, make sure that you're able to work without being interrupted. Now we're gonna whip this up until it looks like basically like marshmallow fluff and it'll be relatively cool. While this is mixing, I'm gonna go ahead and assemble my tartlets. We've whipped our Italian meringue for several minutes on high speed. It's cool to the touch.

Just gonna tap out the excess and now I'm gonna put it in my pastry bag, which I have fitted. Let me show you, which I fitted with a medium sized open star tip. And that number. I know you all like your numbers is a Wilton 1-M or you could use and Ateco 824, or basically any star tip you have in your collection will work just fine. Alrighty.

So now we're gonna put our meringue into our pastry bag and we're gonna pipe and burn, good times. So the Italian meringue must be done right before you're ready to serve your tartlets. You can get this all done in advance, not a problem. And they will even hold just like this covered in the refrigerator for several hours, but this should be done as close to service as possible. Alrighty.

So now we're gonna tighten our bag squeeze from the top and here's where the fun begins. It doesn't matter what you do. You can do rosettes. You can do stars and give them nice tails. You can do whatever you want.

A nice mound of meringue. You can do shells. The sky's the limit with this one, and then we're gonna move them off the paper. We're gonna get our blow torch and remember safety first, whenever you're working with a torch, you wanna make sure you're aware of your personal space. And then we're just gonna take this and wave it over our meringue.

Just browning, not burning. There we go. Turn off the torch, put it over here. And that's it. We have made lemon meringue tartlets.