The Foolproof French Lemon Tart Anyone Can Make

Welcome back to the kitchen everybody. Now this year once more it is the lemon season as you can see here and here we've got plenty of lemon and every single year I'm like what should I do with this lemon but this year I thought that I want to give another shot at the famous french style lemon tart but I wanted to make something with a difference something that is as easy as possible and I went through my books and I found the ultimate easiest lemon tart recipe there is and before you ask the question no it is not based on a lemon curd it does not require any butter and you don't need to spend any time on the stove or what you need for this recipe is the ingredients a bowl manual whisk stand mixer an electric whisk and a small tart pan with a removable bottom of course we're going to be using a sweet short crust but that's about it it happens in the oven it is foolproof and delicious before we begin let's have a look at the ingredients very simple you're going to need three whole egg one egg yolk 150 grams of caster sugar a fine granulated sugar about 150 milliliters of cream good quality cream is very important we're going to have a piece of short crust this is a sweet short crust you will find the link to the recipe in the video description and instead of just using lemon and usually it's just lemon juice I'm going to be using a mix of lemon juice and tangerine juice just to show you how versatile that recipe is and in fact you can replace even the lemons by anything you want if you want to use like passion fruit or raspberries or even perhaps strawberry juice you could all right it's very simple now let's go and first take care of the crust now like all the montages we're going to have to blind bake the crust and we're working here with a sweet short crust that can be notoriously annoying to roll and put into a tartan so this is 20 centimeter and the first thing we're going to do is to make sure there's a little bit of you know a dusting of flour at the bottom and the sides on there and then I'm going to give you a trick for that specifically annoying short crust that we have right so as I said the sweet short crust can you know really push you to pull your hair out because it keeps on breaking you see the side if it's too cold it's going to start to kind of break and you need to wait until it's kind of almost room temperature but still cold so that you're able to kind of roll it the advice is roll it on a piece of plastic wrap at the bottom you can put another piece of plastic wrap here at the top and then you're going to be rolling like this because it sticks a lot as well and you're going to do your rolling and your circle when it comes to the size or what you need you got here your 20 centimeter size you want some space around because that's going to go on the edges so you don't want just the size of 20 meter you want something a bit bigger all right that's that's the first advice now when you got the required size instead of immediately trying to get that thing and place it into your tart mold what I like to do is to put this onto a baking sheet and put it in my freezer to firm up so I'll do this you see put it on here it's ready to go but before I do anything I'm going to place this into my freezer because when it's nice and cold you will see it's going to be very very easy to handle and put in the tart mold so here we go just a few minutes five minutes or something like this and my dough now is a little bit firmer and I can just take it I can hold it and I can see my dish under there and then very slowly so there's plenty of room I'm going to start to push down slowly to make sure it goes inside okay so let it go with the gravity don't push too hard because it's super fragile and then we're going to arrange it afterwards by hand don't worry so as I've mentioned this is going to annoy you it may break it happens to me as well on the side here but I'm doing my best we're going to use the rolling pin to cut off all the other things in here okay and like you've seen surely in other videos when it comes to home cooking if you have missing bits inside if some part is too thin or too thick you can actually with this kind of crust use your fingers go around and make sure that everything is roughly the same size I'm going with my thumb here it's going to be blind baked we don't have to worry just going around make something neat now once you manage to put the dough in it will annoy you don't worry there might be pieces breaking you can patch things up with your finger it doesn't matter we're going to blind bake so take a little fork we're going to make some little holes and I'm going to place that again in my freezer to firm up very important the tortilla is ready that's nice and cold now what we're going to do is take a piece of parchment paper and I'm going to fill this with beads so you want plenty of them so typically I go all out as many as I can because you want the weight and you really want this to be pressed down everywhere on the side to avoid that your crust moves you know at all it needs to be really firm I don't want the bottom to bubble up and start to make a shape like this and so nice and straight so I'm all done this is covering the side to avoid any burning on the cross and we're not putting the tray in the oven I'm just going to transfer just the tart mold into the oven middle rack and leave this for 10 to 15 minutes that's it so it took me about 12 minutes 13 minutes to cook that or to bake the tart shell and the first thing I'm going to do of course to remove all the beads I'm going to have a look at what we have and put this into a bowl and boom so what we can see nothing has shrunk I mean the nice edge is still there and it's ready to be filled I now moved my tart shell onto a cooling rack and we're going to have to leave this to cool while we're preparing the preparation with the lemon juice okay so you don't need to take this out of the mold at all you leave it like that and you leave it to cool down and we're going to use it afterwards so once your tart shell is ready you've done all the hard work and the rest here the preparation as you're going to see it's super easy now let's talk about something that is very important you may have heard about this is having a metallic taste in your preparation after it's being cooked perhaps you haven't heard about it but this is extremely common and it is extremely annoying the reason you're getting this is because you've been using a u-stencil a sieve a whisk made of stainless steel that is reactive it's not a professional grade of food grade stainless steel so when you use stainless steel make sure it is something that is labeled as non-reactive to avoid this altogether what I'm doing I'm avoiding metal so I've got a silicone whisk I've got a synthetic sieve here I've got a ceramic bowl and everything is made of glass and ceramic like this I don't have to bother we're not going to bother with that metallic taste all right and now let's make the preparation as I told you it's super simple so finally what is that method that does not require any cooking it is something actually you've used plenty of time and it is simply the technique that we use when we're making a custard what we're going to do here is exactly the same as when you're making a sweet dessert a quiche even when you're making a savory custard except that here's a sweet custard but it's a sweet custard that is flavored with juice and that's about it and there's no need to pre-cook it you can make it right into the the bowl in here and then we're going to put it into the tart and cook it it's that simple so I've got here my three eggs and one egg yolk that I'm going break like this with my whisk we're going to add all of the sugar in and make sure you whisk the whole lot until the sugar is pretty much all melted all right so spend a good minute or something like this and this is the mixture that I've got and once you're here what we're going to do we're going to add the cream okay mix it in now I've got 150 ml and that is the equivalent of this three lemon and an orange but I think you could go a little bit less than that but I'm going to add everything in here now because it can become very tart and that's about it your mixture is mixed it's done it's ready to be used we're going to pour it into the tart now before we go any further you need to look at something it's here and that is a foam that hides actually the nice color of that lemony custard so we want to get rid of that so again ideally you want to use a plastic spoon or anything like this don't go use a metal spoon because again it could react and I'm going to try to scoop up all that foam and discard it and then when I'm done I'm going to put this for a fine mesh sieve you know that synthetic sieve that I've got as an extra step typically when I'm done I'm taking a jug because it's easier to take the jug to pour this into the mold but I'm going to very carefully transfer everything in here and try to avoid that foam as much as you can I'm telling you it's a nightmare that foam we're now ready to fill our tart shell so we're going to be baking this onto a baking sheet to prevent that how custard starts to boil because again he said that if you boil this this custard with the lemon it could even there because of the egg start to develop some metallic taste again so that's a bit of an advanced theory on there but that is really to prevent boiling because if it boils really it's going to make these holes at the top so you don't want that always putting a baking sheet so I've got my shell on here it is cool enough it doesn't have to be a fridge cold or anything like that just room temperature is fine and now very delicately I'm going to be pouring roughly half of the mixture here because we're going to have to fill this to the brim I'm going to do the I'm going to do half here then move that tray into the oven and once it's the oven I'm going to continue pouring the rest like this I can carry this without having the the caster to overflow sorry in advance about the horrible light in the oven here but you get the idea this is in the oven you see it's not filled up and from here I'm going to be very delicately not making you to feel this really really to the top the time is not set in stone and we don't want to overcook this as soon as it's set it can still be a little bit wobbly in the middle it's ready we're going to take it out let's go now the tart is out of the oven and there's a lot of things to unpack on here because I've been actually playing around with the size of my oven while it was cooking to test different things mainly the difference between having a fan for setting on when you make this kind of little french tarts or other desserts compared to the fan off and I always find that cooking with the fan on is always hard and always leads to problem and these little edges see these little edges here little french I was using fan force at the beginning for like 10 minutes or something after 15 minutes it started still to boil on the side because of that blast of heat all the time and I really more and more don't like fan force on with baking it's not delicate enough so I turn the fan off and reduce the temperature I've you know I've set it to like a cruisy 170 degrees celsius and then in finish to cook properly I have removed the tart from you from the mold that with the removable base is very easy and look at this is how the crust looks like and this is post decoration keep in mind that anything baking typically it's never ready when it's out of the oven there's always a decoration you need to add some fruit some lemon make it look nice etc etc before you serve it you present it and you slice it so this is what I'm going to do I'm going to leave it to cool put it in the fridge and when it's all decorated well we'll do the slicing and there we have it with a few little tweaks and that tart is now looking much much better the first thing you have to do is to glaze the tart with clear syrup and so the crust shines and the whole the whole thing shines as well and after that a few slices of lemon some mint and a grate of lime and you get something that is more than this and now of course we need to see how it tastes like so we have to slice it be very careful for the slicing do not use a steel knife with a lot of carbon like a Japanese knife anything like me because you're going to leave a trace of metallic taste behind once more so we're going to use a standard knife that is non-reactive and let's try the beautiful tart I'm using here a steak knife and this is the kind of cutlery style things you get restaurant grade and you're sure it's not going to react with anything because it is meant to be used with food so you can cut this any way you want I'm just going to go for the middle here let's try to get it open look at that really works let's zoom in I've zoomed in because I wanted to see exactly this here so this is the type of filling remember no butter no stove nothing you make your custard you pour the whole thing in and this is what we've got the crust is really thin it's been properly cooked it's crunchy and this is really like a curd it's exactly the same thing look at that I'm going to bite into it might hold very very well I love the addition of cream much better than butter this is so easy to eat it's pretty amazing and the sweet short crust in here see how crunchy that is I have just got another slice just to show you the texture of that easy lemon tart and to be honest if you've been really holding back from making it because of the whole you know curd situation and the double boiler try this method because look at that this is perfect the texture it holds the crust and it's everything to love about this tart so there we have it so honestly what do you think how does it compare to a lemon curd that has to be on the stove with the double boiler with the butter this is a no butter recipe it is really stress-free foolproof and you can also flavor it with different things lemon is the star lemon with orange you can do citrus you can do passion fruit you can raspberry you can do all sorts of things so I will give you all the recipes for that filling as well for the sweet short crust and if you make this let me know what you think let me know how does it compare was this really way easier to something that you've been making before I leave that to you use the comment section to let me know and as for me I will see you of course next time for another video on the french cooking academy take care bye