'Sicilian' Lemons (Actually from Amalfi)
Assembly Line of Pastry Crusts
Egg Graveyard (70 in total)
First Plating of the Day
I kid you not.
I awoke Monday morning from a 19 hour lemon-tart-athon covering both Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Saturday was spent making the pastry crust and lemon curd filling (which involved “constantly stirring” 15 batches of lemon curd), and Sunday was spent rolling out the pastry, baking them, assembling with the lemon, baking again, making 8 cups of mascarpone cream and then plating up 120 servings (15 tarts in total)
Exhausting? Yes. Sore muscles? You betcha! Spending the weekend as a ‘professional’ pastry chef for my friend’s ‘pop-up restaurant’ – absolutely phenomenal.
Rewind back a few weeks to when AG originally rang me to get my thoughts on helping him out with his Pop-Up endeavour. I’d sent through a number of dessert suggestions that fit with his Tuscan inspired menu, but new to this ‘professional baking’ thing I didn’t think about the effort involved in making so many of one particular dish. Lesson learned. The effort involved in lemon tarting is exponentially greater than let’s say, a mascarpone cheesecake with balsamic berries. Sure the cheesecake take a lot of time to solidify etc....but it’s ready to go on the day. More of a love ‘em and leave ‘em approach. No faffing about with pastry crust and assembly. And second degree burns covering a 2 inch by 2 inch space on my arm...
The other somewhat comical bit was that of the hundreds of desserts I’ve ever made, I’d never actually made a straight up lemon tart. And with so many different opinions on pastry crust and lemon filling, I knew I needed to do a bit of homework to make sure I got it 'just right.'
Homework manifested itself in 4 lemon tarts the week before the Pop-Up. I had lemon tart coming out of the wazoo. Luckily, I have generous friends (ES, LM, KC) who were ever so kind as to come take the tart off of my butter and sugar coated hands. Probably a good thing because even though I tried to give most away, I still knocked back half of a whole one. But as I was the lead taste tester, it was a rough job that I had to take on – the tart needed to be perfected and we all know practice makes perfect.
And to add calories upon already thousands of calories, May Guilty Pleasures fell into the middle of my Lemon tart practice runs so I also was ‘forced’ to squeeze in a batch of lime and coconut cupcakes with lime cream cheese frosting as well. It was a rough week, one that I’m not entirely sure even 3 dance rehearsals and 2 trips to the gym could even out. Which reminds me, I need to buy stock in Spanx. Note: Lemon tarts and cupcakes are not a match made in heaven with fishnets and sequin shorts.
So what did my research prove?
1. Pastry crust need not be secondary to the lemon tart filling. And while being able to stand on its own two feet, should not just be a conduit for the lemon but a complementary partner in crime.
2. You can make a ‘Scicilian Leman Tart’ with a pastry crust recipe written by a French chef. I used Joël Robuchon’s which included your typical ingredients of flour, butter, eggs, etc. but also calls for ground almonds and vanilla beans (in an attempt at cost savings I used extract instead of the bean).
3. Lemon tart filling recipes should not be complicated. I tried the ‘sabayon’ method – it ended in disaster and all over me. However, recipes can be doubled but should most definitely NOT be tripled or quadrupled.*
*Note: I was getting exhausted and tried combining the lemon curd batches, three or four at a time... only to have to separate it back out into two pots so it would finally thicken, because it wouldn't with so much in one pot. Just picture me sitting by my stove top (yes sitting, I was EXHAUSTED) with 2 whisks, one in each hand ... ‘stirring constantly’...for a few hours. At least when I was only doing one batch at a time I had one free hand for playing scrabble on my iphone. Not. A. Joke.
4. Sorry folks, but mascarpone cream, whilst indescribably delicious, tastes pretty much exactly like plain whipped cream, only with a slightly more dense consistency. Not sure it’s worth the extra bucks/quid/yen to make it with mascarpone, but it did give the lemon tart a slightly more Italian nuance.
