I'd like to take this time to upload my essay I wrote for this disaster. It's been several weeks after the fact and I'm still dumbfounded by it (as well as fairly impressed at how much I did manage to screw up a recipe!) It also gives you a glimpse at what cooking in our apartment can be like!
Before you begin your descent into the following madness, let me
begin by saying this: I love to bake! As long as I have the kitchen to myself I am more than happy to experiment with sweet recipes. During my time in Florence, I've taken to cooking and baking even more, creating a variety of sweets and dishes that, if I may say so, turned out quite scrumptious!
Trying to bake this French Apple Tart, taught to me by Julia Child
was an entirely different experience.
After four burns, two cuts, two ruined pans, covering the floor in
flour, and almost setting the fire alarm off, I found my love for baking did not extend to this trainwreck. How Julia
Child managed this dessert is beyond me… She is a famous French cuisine cook, so
perhaps her knack for this tart was simply in her veins. Or perhaps she had
measuring cups.
The kitchen I have been cooking in the past month is quaint: a
large area for preparing food with wood cabinets and a gas stove that I have a
hate-love relationship with. My roommates and I could not bring our own cooking
wear so the kitchen was filled with what we might need. Not among them were pie
making equipment, silver wear not larger than a tablespoon, or measuring cups.
I’ve baked in the kitchen many times, throwing in a dash of flour here, some
more sugar there… And let me tell you, everything I’ve made has been fantastic!
We have a fresh fruit store just next door that I’m at constantly. I was so
thrilled to find we were going to be able to cook for this next assignment,
perhaps I hadn’t thought ahead. I had my mind set on the tart: desserts will
forever be the first on my list to create!
I watched Julia Child’s video for the French Tart and was all set:
I had the ingredients written down, the directions set up. I was prepared! She
is inspirational, Child, she simply makes you want to bake and try whatever it
is she pulled out of the oven. At the grocery store I ran into my first
obstacle: “What is Vegetable Shortening in Italian?” I gave up my search
quickly and figured it couldn’t be that
necessary to the recipe, right? I had everything else lined up on the counter when
I returned home. Obstacle number two arose much quicker than I would have
liked. Julia Child has many fancy tools and mechanisms to create her dishes and
especially with this tart, she had a lot of cooking equipment I’m fairly sure I
hadn’t seen before in my life. Mostly, the metal cylinder that would hold the
crust up in place while it cooked. “That’s okay,” I foolishly thought. “I’ll
improvise!”
My improvisions were not as clever as I had thought I was being. I
grabbed a deep-set pan to cook everything in and after having mixed the dough
(I thought I was doing pretty good so far) and let it chill for a few hours, I
rolled it out and set it gingerly into the pan. Thus came my third obstacle. We
don’t have an oven. I have been doing all of my baking in a tiny little toaster
oven and had thought this could work just the same!! I popped that sucker in
and began on the filling.
I had no way of mushing the apples so into the pot thinly diced
apples went, and I let them cook, mixing them here and there to test if they
were at a properly-mushable state and making sure they wouldn’t burn. Child had
not explained the filling very thoroughly so I was going out on a limb,
assuming it would all work out in the end. I let them stay and went back to
attending the dough. This is when things begin to go wrong. The sides would not
stay upright in the dough and after putzing with it and leaving it in the oven
far too long, I finally took it out and flipped the pan in order to extract
what I thought should have been a firm crust. The edges crumbled off and the
middle sogged over onto the counter, hardly baked and looking fairly pathetic!
There was no hope for this crust, so I gave it a proper funeral in the trash
and quickly began on a second dough. Meanwhile, guess what I had forgotten on
the stove?
Second dough done and hastily thrown into the fridge to cool
(“Child said two hours or two days doesn’t much matter. How about two
minutes?”), my roommate appears from the bedroom and asks why the apartment had
gotten so smoky. Smoky? What is—The
apples!!!
Pot painfully ruined, and burnt down to the bottom were the poor
apples that had no idea what their fate would entail this night. Refusing to
buy more apples, I made do and quickly added in my peach jam (apricot jam
simply didn’t exist in our grocery store) and threw in some sugar. The smoke
cleared after opening a window and I was left to see my disaster first hand. It
was a terrifying sight. Brown, mushy goo
sat in the pot. I poured in some pink wine (wine always makes things better)
and taste tested it. To my utter surprise, it was not half bad!! Before any of
this had taken place, I was completely shocked when Julia Child said to add in
jam to this concoction and here I was, ruining
it and it was still definitely edible. The pot met it’s doom tonight,
though at least pouring the mess into the now baked crust, still in the pan
because I was not about to mess with taking it out again, was a pleasant
notion.
I threw some thinly sliced apples onto the top of it, made it look
fancy and pretty and cover up the disaster below, and tossed it all back into
the microwave oven.
Let me say that I am leaving out the parts where I make a mess of
the entire kitchen and manage to burn myself more than just once. None of that
is important in my terribly long recollection of baking French Apple Tarts.
Finally after several hours, the tart appears done. It looks
nothing like Child’s had. In fact when I go to cut a slice, the fillings all
spill out, mooshy and rather dead
looking. “I am so sorry,” I say as I hand my roommates each a plate of whatever
it was I had made. We all shrug to each other as we shovel it into our mouths,
not nearly as bad as I had expected. One of my roommates brought up an
interesting point however, as I had explained the assignment to her. We see
“tarts” throughout the Italian pasticceri constantly and they are nothing like
Child had made. I would love to look into more of France’s baked goods and
compare them to Italy’s for they seem entirely different for being so close together.
With titles even the same as “tart” or “croissant” they are simply completely
different from each other.
I will say I was not expecting this baking experience to have gone
at all like this. I would actually like to try the other recipes Child has on the
website, perhaps I would have better luck with those. I can’t say for sure if I
learned much about French cuisine through this experiment for I managed to mess
it up so terribly bad, but it did give me insight to how different baked goods
are throughout the world.
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