TWD: Tourtely Apple Tart

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie was selected by my buddy Jeannette of The Whimsical Cupcake: tourtely apple tart.  A what?  Yeah, that’s pretty much what I said 🙂  According to Dorie, tourte is the French word for a covered tart.  So it’s sort of like a skinny pie – the top and bottom crust made from Dorie’s sweet tart dough, which is almost cookie-like here.  The filling for this tart is a really fragrant and delicious chunky homemade applesauce – apple are cooked down with brown sugar and then tossed with nutty browned butter and vanilla (plus raisins and pinches of both cinnamon and salt in my case).

I couldn’t be bothered to do the math to figure out how to scale this recipe back so I made the full size 9-inch tart.  The recipe is a fair amount of work, but it can be spread out over an afternoon.  Individually the components could even be made a few days ahead of time and assembled/baked at the last minute.  The filling calls for tart-sweet apples and I had no idea what that meant (seriously, is there an apple cheat sheet somewhere?) so I used golden delicious.  The other thing that gave me pause in this recipe?  I kept rereading the instructions (I even had Shane read them to make sure I wasn’t missing something) looking for the place where Dorie told us to cut steam holes in the top crust before baking the tart.  It wasn’t there so I didn’t, and things turned out fine.  I cut little leaves from the dough scraps for the top because I thought it needed something.    

I don’t think I’ve baked with apples since last fall, so this was a welcome treat here.  Any time I can have an apple pie-like treat without making pie dough I’m happy.  A definite repeat here!  Many thanks to Jeannette for hosting this week!  She’ll share the recipe on her blog today, or you can find it on pages 306-307 of Baking: From My Home to Yours.