Apple Charlotte Recipe | Adam Byatt

Okay, today we're going to cook an apple charlotte which is a beautiful classical French dessert. Super simple, really cheap to do and there's not enough of these on the menu in restaurants and pubs and bars. So let's get this dish reinvented and back on the menu. I made apple charlotte for the graduation for the Royal Academy apprenticeship scheme that I did some 30 years ago. It was the dessert I had to do for the late Albert Roux, Michel Roux, Michel Bourdin, all sorts. It was terrifying but I love the dish and then I went on to make this dish in many ways and when I started to come out of my shell a little bit I made a wild mushroom charlotte. Felt very avant-garde at the time, this is in the late 80s. We're going to start with brownie apples. Now I like brownie apples because we can add some sugar and butter to them, they are particularly tart. We need to get the apples on the go first and I think if you make anything to do with an apple pie I'm a big fan of using brownie apples. So get those on first, quarter those, chop them up, bit of butter, bit of sugar, exactly the same as we make our apple sauce which is in lots of other recipes we've done already. So all I'm going to do is chop those up into nice even sized pieces, they're going into a pan, we're going to puree them down in a pan with butter and sugar so nothing too intricate there. Bit of butter, sugar, beautiful. Right so in there we've got our lovely chopped brownie apples, we've got some butter, salted frozen butter and we've got some caster sugar. Doesn't need anything else, needs to just sit in there, nice cartouche on top and a lid, very very slowly and they'll just soften and become the most delicious unctuous creamy velvety apples for our charlotte. So that cartouche is there to make sure that everything steams inside, lets out some of the water which we need to get rid of that water as well and then we're going to pop a lid on there as well and keep that at a really low temperature and just be patient with it and cook that down. All looking good, okay let's line these charlotte moulds. Now you can use whatever you want, use a nice Dario mould, you can use a nice round mould, nice metal mould, I like to use these but we cook a lot of sort of little chocolate pots in them or souffles in them and bread and butter puddings in them, things like that, they're really cheap, we use them all the time in the restaurant and they're easy, we call them a miso bowl for no reason other than the fact that we serve a bit of soup in them sometimes. Okay so what we're going to do, the bread to line these moulds, you're going to take really expensive, really complicated bread, thank you Hovis, actually the simpler, cheaper bread the better, just take off all the crust, of course you can make it with brioche but I think it burns so I don't do it with that and this is supposed to be a very simple classic French dessert, I'm not going to mess with it, I'm going to do it properly and do it as it's supposed to be. All you do, take a rolling pin and just roll the bread out, that's why you need cheap bread because it rolls out like that and you make a big stack of rolled out bread and you go back and have a quick check on your apples, ticking away, so I'm going to cut a fancy one out at the bottom just so it looks a little bit prettier on the bottom. Okay then these pieces, we're just going to cut these like that, right you're going to help me with this Rose because it's a big construction job, this is one where you get all the family involved. What we need to do is dip this in, this is melted butter, it's not clarified, just simply melted butter, put one of those in the bottom like that and at this point my oven is set at 180 degrees, it's already going, already hot, so as soon as they're ready I can just put them straight in the oven, it's very simple. So all I'm doing is taking my strips of bread and my melted salted French butter and I'm just dipping the bread very quickly and gently into here and then running it up the side of the mould and then over the edge so it's looped over, that's really important. There we go, four lovely charlottes. Right let's go back to our apples, what's really nice here Sam is they're not, they're not catching on the bottom, good pans for start but it's that method of having the cartouche, no liquid in there right, just butter and sugar, having the cartouche on there and the lid and just letting it happen really, really slowly, slow as possible temp, it won't stick and it'll all crush down like that, I love that, really like apples like that. Right we've got here, these are the poshest raisins you're ever going to see, these are demi-sec raisins, we're using them in a restaurant a lot for different bits and pieces but they're really expensive and they're utterly delicious, they are number one raisins. Okay so apples are now ready, turn that off and give that a mix, no huge amount of water in there, in goes some nice raisins, you see we've still got some little bits of chunky apple and that's okay, that's into there, in there hot, absolutely fine, bread's not going to be a problem for that, there it goes, right just start folding those over Rose, there you go, over like that, you need to make sure they're going the right way round all right. I think this could go on the menu at Brasserie Constance actually because I think this is a good British take on French which is very Constance Fry, I think it would work brilliantly for that. So I'm just going to put those on, I'm going to spoon over a little bit of butter on the top, so just that melted butter on top. Okay they're going to go onto a tray and go into my pre-heated oven remember, for I don't know how long, I'm going to cook them and I'll tell you how long it took. In they go, nice and simple, not a difficult thing to do. Let's get this out of the oven, I think they're cooked. These have had 30 minutes, they took longer than I thought actually, so 180 for 30 minutes to achieve this sort of colouration, nice and crispy. So that's sort of what we're looking for, crispy, crispy, crispy, crispy bread. I'm going to grab myself a plate, all I'm going to do is to get one of those on the plate, well I'm just going to put the plate on the top like that, I'm going to turn it over, I'm going to say a little prayer and hope it comes out. Isn't that a beautiful thing? Okay there you go, that is my rather lovely looking apple charlotte. I think double cream is the order of the day, we go with some nice double cream on the bottom, I think we should also do a nice vanilla ice cream. That is my apple charlotte with double cream and a wonderful vanilla ice cream, that takes me right back to my college days, my apprenticeship graduation day of making apple charlotte and then cooking it for my wife as a savoury wild mushroom charlotte. Give that a go, let's get this dish back on more menus in restaurants and pubs and brasseries and bistros all over Britain. This dessert I reckon cost me 50p, it's a lot of butter in it, the butter is probably the most expensive part in that whole thing. That is a very very cheap and effective dish to make, so if you need some help with your margins in your restaurants and you want to make dishes that are a bit more efficient, a bit more user-friendly but they take a little bit more craft to do, that's a show-stopping dish that you can charge really good money for because there's craft and care and love in it, but it's not going to hit your margin. Good dish.