This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie selection was chosen by Babette of the blog Babette Feasts… and for a lemon lover like me, well, it was a pure delight :)   With the warm summer sun fast approaching (heck, where I live it’s already here!) it’s nice baking with lemon and other lighter flavors.  Having recently planted a variety of citrus trees around our yard, I’m anticipating a bumper crop of organic fruit later this year.  Now that’s something to look forward to!

I gotta be honest and tell ya… as much as I love Dorie and her recipes, Dorie’s recipe for tart dough has never worked for me. Not quite sure what it is but I have never had success with it.  Oh I’ve tried… heaven’s knows I’ve tried… and finally decided to move on and find a recipe that does work for me.  I have a favorite that I’ve posted here but of course I just can’t resist trying something new.  This week I came across this post by David Lebovitz for a tart dough using a method I had never even heard of before, let alone tried.  You take butter, water, oil, sugar and salt… and bring them to a boil in the oven… just to the point where the butter starts to brown.  Next you add the flour, create a dough ball then turn it out onto your tart pan and press it in and bake it.  While the method is, to me, completely unconventional, I must say it is the best looking, most beautiful and nearly perfect tart shell I’ve ever made.

Having made Dorie’s Tartest Lemon Tart a couple of times before… both times with absolutely disasterous results… I decided to play around with this recipe to see if I could get it to work for me.  You see, when I’ve made it before, the crust has burned badly long before the filling is set.  I’ve reduced the heat… I’ve covered the edges… and neither helped so this time I thought what I really needed to do was to reduce the length of time the filled tart spent in the oven itself.  So in a saucepan I combined the zest, pulp and juice of two very large lemons, one cup of sugar (1/2c less than the recipe states) and 4 tablespoons of butter.  Once the butter was melted I took the 1 1/2T of cornstarch and added to it just enough water to dissolve… and then added this to the saucepan.  I continued to cook until the mixture began to thicken.  In a separate bowl I had already whisked the egg, yolks and heavy cream… and, whisking constantly I slowly added the thickened lemon mixture.  Doing it slowly tempered the egg mixture and nothing curdled or cooked… yay!!!!  I poured this into the cooled tart shell then baked for about 20 minutes until the filling was pretty much set but still a little bit jiggly in the center.  This worked like a dream and I could not be more pleased with the results.

The filling is so fabulous… very tart even though I did not use the entire lemon.  You see, I’ve done that before and found the taste to be bitter… which is a far cry from tart.  I love tart but bitter? Not so much.  That’s why this time I used only the zest, pulp and juice… and I have zero regrets :)  If you’d like the actual recipe that Dorie created, it can be found on page 336 of her book Baking From My Home To Yours… (sorry but as of this writing, the recipe is not posted on Babette’s blog).  Please take a moment to check out the other TwD bakers and how they fared with this week’s Tartest Lemon Tart recipe :)

Have a delicious day!

Tags: Dorie Greenspan, lemon, Tuesdays with Dorie