Apple Tarte Tatin recipe is the simplest of ingredients yet elevates them to exquisite flavors and beauty. Simply apples, sugar, water, butter, flour, and salt it uses clever cooking to create a tender Caramel Apple pie filling with Crispy Buttery Crust. Foolproof, quick and easy, once you know the tricks.
Make this Apple Tarte Tatin recipe once, and it will enter your repertoire as a regular. Likely you will expand your repertoire to the fruit that is fresh and at its harvest peak of flavor – pear, plums, peaches, nectarines and more! Even a caramelized onion version may soon grace your table.
Harvest Fresh Fruit Honored at Their Peak
A “secret” of great baking and cooking is using food in their peak season. The Tarte Tatin can be made any time of year. I encourage you to choose your fruit based on what is beautifully tasty, harvest fresh and at its height of nutrients.
Apples are harvested fresh at many times of year, so always a favorite. But don’t be shy about using whatever is newly into season now.
The perfect recipe for anyone with a fruit tree or a great produce section in their local grocery. When all the apricots, cherries, plums, pears or whichever fruit trees you have come into harvest, now is your chance to use 12 apples or 20 plums in one delicious dish. The same recipe applies for all the fruit you have. Delicious!
The Tatin Sisters Created This Quintessential French Tart
In the 1880s Stephanie “Fanny” Tatin created an Apple Tart recipe. The robust tourism industry in the French countryside outside Paris provides an affluent market of Parisians looking for delicious food. Soon Stephanie’s Apple Tart becomes famous among those “in the know.”
There are many stories about how this recipe was made as a happy mistake. The prevailing story is that Stephanie was frantically cooking and making an apple pie. She made the caramel sauce and softened the apples, which started to overcook. By legend, she put the pastry over the top to cool it and keep it from burning.
She cooked it upside down, flipped it over and served it. Patrons raved complements about the unique dessert. Surprised and delighted, the Tatin sisters added it to the menu.
The Tatin sisters, Caroline and Stephanie open the Hotel Tatin in 1894 in Lamotte-Beuvron in the Loire Valley. The famous apple tart becomes a “must have” of Parisian tourists and the apple dessert tart is written up in travel guides of the time.
While the recipe was never published by Stephanie Tatin, friends and rivals alike shared their versions after her death. In fact, a version of the recipe sealed its place as a quintessential French dessert. The recipe was published in 1926 La France Gastronomique and named “The Famous Apple or Pear Tarte from the Demoiselles Tatin of La Motte-Beuvron” (demoiselles is “damsels”, French for unmarried women or “Miss”(pl)).
Maxim’s in Paris later added their version to the menu, cementing the recipe into French history. They even added to the legend of the Tatin Sisters with an elaborate and unbelievable story about one of the owners of Maxim’s learning the recipe when posing as a gardener at the Hotel Tatin. Of course, the owner would have been only four years old at the time, but it adds another tale to the legend of the Tarte Tatin.
Learn the Tips and Techniques for the Apple Tarte Tatin Recipe from the Video
French Technique Kitchen Secrets make Tarte Tatin such a Clever Recipe
The French have transformed cooking and baking techniques to scientific precision. It can be daunting to tackle all the precise techniques. But you will learn some by making this quintessential French recipe. Crisping a crust because it is on top. Ensuring moist pie filling, because it is cooked sealed in a dish and pastry. Clever!
For me, Chef Raymond Blanc, a French chef who has lived much of his adult life in the UK, helped me to master useful French Kitchen Secrets. He understands American and UK cooking habits and technique.
He wrote a book years ago, that changed my life and raised my cooking to a new standard. It is a brilliant cookbook that makes expert techniques approachable and easy. It improved my Tarte Tatin techniques among many other recipes in a friendly, understandable and clear way.
If you are looking to raise your cooking and baking techniques, try Kitchen Secrets by Chef Raymond Blanc.
Authentic French Recipe for Apple Tarte Tatin
Authentic Tarte Tatin inspired by origin Tatin Sisters recipe
Equipment
- Oven mitts
Ingredients
Tatin pastry
- 300 g butter puff pastry or pie crust or sweet crust pastry
Filling
- 40 ml water
- 100 g sugar, granulated or caster
- 6 to 12 apples (firm) alternatively pears or plums/peaches/stone fruit
- 60 g butter, diced and ideally frozen
- 30 g butter, melted
Instructions
Prepare the Pastry
- Roll out 2 mm 1/16 inch thick round on a lightly floured surface, 3 cm / 1¼ inch larger on all sides than the tatin/pie dish or skillet (nonstick, stainless steel, iron) you are using to form the tart (for example, 9 inch pie dish will want an 11½ inch round; using a plate as a guide can help to cut it precisely
- Lightly prick it all over with a fork (puff pastry) or cut a few small holes near center (pie pastry)
- Wrap it in cling film or lay it on a sheet of parchment paper – freeze
Preheat oven to 350 F / 180 C
Prepare the Filling, Caramel and Fruit
- Put water in tatin dish (pie dish or skillet pan)
- Spoon the sugar evenly and let it absorb the water for at least 2 minutes
- Peel and quarter apples. Remove seeds / core. (can place them in a bowl of cold water with lemon juice to avoid browning, but not necessary for this recipe) – must keep the apples ready before making the caramel
- Over medium-high heat, cook the sugar water syrup to a very pale blond caramel. It will continue to cook and darken in the hot tatin dish and in the oven, so remove immediately from the heat just as color starts to appear
- Stir in the cold diced butter (off the heat). You now have a caramel sauce in the base of your tatin dish
Assemble the Tarte Tatin
- Arrange the apple quarters very tightly. The bottom of the dish/pan will become the top of the Tarte Tatin, so make a beautiful pattern that will be appreciated when the tart is turned over.
- Start by arranging the fruit around the edge of the dish first, rounded outside of apple down, then fill in the middle in a similar fashion. Make sure the center has an apple as a beautiful center. (Alternatively, apple slices can be arranged in fan shapes as a decorative top)
- Pack tightly, slipping additional apple quarters in to fill in gaps tightly. Avoid having any gaps and allow fruit to be deep like a good pie filling
- Gently press the fruit down with your hands to ensure there are no gaps and equal arrangement of fruit. You should feel a balanced tension across the fruit. If you feel any gaps, fill those and adjust tension.
- Brush the fruit with the melted butter, using a pastry brush if you have one. This will help the apples roast beautifully and stay moist and delicious
Bake the Tarte Tatin
- Cook in the oven for 30 minutes, then take out the dish
- Place the disc of frozen pastry on the top of the fruit and tuck the edges down the side of the dish, to the bottom of the dish.
- Make sure the holes in the pastry are sufficient to allow steam to escape. If not, pierce a few small holes near the center
- Bake in the oven an additional 45 minutes until the puff pastry is golden brown and crispy
Video
Nutrition
Emile Henry Makes the Tatin Even Easier
Once you try a Tarte Tatin, you will make it a regular dessert in your repertoire. Why not make it even easier by using a Tarte Tatin Set by Emile Henry which makes the preparing the tart and flipping out onto the perfect size plate simply perfect. I love, love, love mine! Check it out and see if its right for you.
What’s Next?
Try using different fruit. A Plum Tatin made of halved plums is a beauty to see and eat.
Try onions. Yes, onions. Caramelized onion tart is delicious, especially when served with a tangy cheese like goat cheese – think of French onion soup with pastry! I first saw this on The Great British Baking Show / The Great British Bake Off, when the winner made Onion Tatin. Amazing!
Explore other recipes that use Harvest Fresh Fruit at their peak, such as Zucchini Bread (sweet cake like Banana Bread), Candied Orange, and more at the Extend Food Life page.
Raise your game on sustainability of your food use with a few hacks and recipes. Bookmark the Extend Food Life page, check back every couple weeks for new ideas. And Subscribe to the Ready and Thriving YouTube Channel to have new inspiration suggested in your YouTube feed.
