French Raspberry Tart Recipe
My love of food keeps me humble. It seems that every week I learn something new that is typically taught the first week of culinary school.For example tart crust is different than pie crust. And, if you want me to get fancy, I can. Pie crust is called pâte brisée. This is your typical pie crust that Retro Rose makes, and I recently featured here with stars and stripes peach pie.
Tart crust is called pâte sucrée. It is a short crust that holds the filling and is often sweeter. It stands on it’s own when you hold it, unlike pie crust. The tart can be removed from it’s baking container; you can’t do that with pie crust, pâte brisée.
Tart crust, which is often blind baked (but not always), is a more crumbly crust, which works well for a pastry cream and fruit. Usually, the main difference in ingredients is eggs. The eggs give the crust its “cookie” type texture. But, I’ve made shortbread crust for the Chez Panisse almond tart that had no eggs. Confused yet? This just might be why pie crust/tart crust, etc. is considered culinarily daunting.
There is another tart crust worth mentioning. Pâte sablée is yet another tart crust very similar to pâte sucrée, only much more of a shorter crust and very rich. It’s often made with ground almonds and a good amount of sugar, resulting in a cookie type crust.
A tart crust often has more sugar than a pie crust, but can be baked savory as in this french tomato tart.
A few things to ask yourself when deciding if you want pie crust (pate brisee) or tart crust (pate sucree) is what it is to be filled with and how it will be eaten.
If you can envision a firmer yet crumbly crust that serves almost as a plate for your ingredients, you are going in the tart direction, pâte sucrée or pâte sablée These are the type of crusts that you will find in a french bakery, holding a pastry cream with fresh fruit.
The Raspberry Tart
I almost made the raspberry tart featured on the June cover of La Cucina Italiana. It’s a beautiful picture, and I used their recipe for the tart crust. But there was no pastry cream and that wouldn’t do for me. If I’m going with a fruit tart, I have to have pastry cream, so I leaned on Emeril for the recipe.
If you want to do make the La Cucinaa Italiana version, make this pastry dough, and when baked and cooled, spoon in seedless raspberry jam, add fresh raspberries and top with demura sugar.
Since I originally posted, I made a new tart today for July 4th, adding in blueberries. It was over the top good. Do everything the same as below, but use a pint of raspberries and a pint of blueberries.
You can also bake raspberries into a pie. Get recipe here.
More Raspberry Recipes
- 1¾ cups flour
- ¼ tablespoon granulated sugar
- pinch salt
- 10 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into cubes
- 2 large egg yolks
- finely grated zest of 1 lemon
- 2 tablespoons cold water
- tart dough, pâte sucrée (recipe below)
- 1½ pints raspberries
- pastry cream (recipe below)
- seedless raspberry jam or apricot jelly
- 1 cup whole milk
- ½ half vanilla bean, halved lengthwise
- ⅓ cup sugar
- 4½ teaspoons all purpose flour
- 3 large egg yolks
- 4 teaspoons unsalted butter
- Tart dough, Pastry cream recipe instructions below.
- Spread a little jam on bottom. Top with pastry cream. Arrange raspberries into the cream.
- Heat remaining jam in pan until it’s in liquid form. Brush raspberries with jam, using pastry brush. Chill.
- These tarts remained intact, not soggy for 24 hours. You can fully assemble the morning of your dinner party.
- You can put in food processor and bring together until dough is formed, or do this by hand.
- Whisk together flour, sugar, salt. Mix in lemon zest and using fingers evenly distribute. Add cold butter and make sure all butter is covered with flour. Mix with fingers until it looks like course meal. Put egg yolks and water in center of mixture and mix with hands to incorporate.
- Knead dough 5 to 6 times on floured surface. Form into disc. Cover with plastic and chill for 30 minutes.
- Roll out and cut into four 5½” circles. I used a mason jar lid.
- Press into tart pans, fork indentations, and chill for 30 minutes.
- Line with parchment paper (with some overlap), and place beans or pie weights in each tart.
- Bake at 350 for 12 minutes. Remove parchment and bake for another 5 minutes, until edges begin to brown. Cool completely.
Helen Amos says
January 27, 2018 at 6:13 amOh! I’ve bought all the ingredients, but where are the instructions for the pastry creme /custard part of the tarts?
Can you post or email how to do this bit please? Thank you!