Chocolate Salted Caramel Tart

As I said in my last post, I wanted to give the chocolate salted caramel tart. The recipe Lily used was Vincent Gadan's from his masterclass on Masterchef so I figured that was the best starting point.

His pastry began with creaming butter and sugar together, then adding an egg and the flour/almond meal. His recipe also involved putting vanilla bean into the pastry but I figure that was a bit unnecessary, and expensive. It's a butter pastry and needs a good deal of refrigerating before you attempt to roll it out. Following the recipe, I was able to make about 350g worth of pastry and I split this into 3 to make 10cm tarts. I rolled out the pastry to about 3mm, blind baked the tarts at 160 degrees for 10 minutes with weight and another 15 without until the pastry was a light golden.

Cracking on with the caramel. Caramel is caramel. I didn't use to like caramel because all I had was the lollies which were rock hard to begin with, chewy as anything in them middle and then stuck in your teeth for the next hour. It was not a pleasant experience. However now, having made my own caramel and used it in various dishes, I have now come to love the flavour. Caramel ice cream is my favourite dessert right now and I'll put that recipe up as soon as I can. Anyway, after Lily's pale caramel I made an effort to make sure mine wasn't undercooked. As a result I burnt it, the first time I burnt caramel. The next one worked much better, good colour and consistency. I didn't salt it heavily enough so it was mostly just caramel. Once again, following the recipe (except for the amount of salt, I'd dramatically reduce that and season to taste), it was enough to fill each of my 3 tarts half way up perfectly.


The next layer was a chocolate ganache. Once again, no great deal of difficulty here. Equal parts chocolate and cream with a bit of butter for gloss and texture. Yet again perfect amount and here we have the finished product.


The pastry was a bit biscuity because I may have taken it a bit far. In the future I'll use Maggie Beer's sour cream pastry because it's easier to make and is much shorter. I'll make sure to taste the caramel to make sure it's salted enough. Apart from those two things, it's a simple and tasty dessert. A winner.