Onion tarte tatin
With onion soubise, red onion marmalade, 101 baby onions, and French menopausal pharmaceuticals.
Setting the Table
Welcome new readers!
A cookbook update: I just picked up the Book of St. John by Fergus Henderson1, which I’ve been meaning to get for some time.
It’s a great book that, like the fantastic restaurant, focuses on offal and nose-to-tail cooking. So it’s just slightly niche and probably won’t feature much on here. Plus I imagine that the five people who want to cook tripe already own it and don’t need my help.
I’m still looking for Michelin / fine dining cookbook suggestions, as we have just 6-7 weeks of recipes left from the Hand & Flowers book. Feel free to hit me up via email, or in the comments!
Lastly, I really want to give a big shout out to the reader who read my very unambiguous recommendation to get the Thermapen and ignore the cheaper versions, and then… went ahead and bought the cheaper version anyway. I salute your independence of thought and hope you enjoy the Thermapen you end up buying in 6 months. But seriously, I really do appreciate the support!
If you’ve been here before, skip ahead! For the benefit of first-time readers, cookbook recipe write-ups are structured as follows: (1) Amuse-bouche - the history and provenance of the dish; (2) Starters - an intro to the fancy Michelin version of the dish I’ll be cooking; (3) Main courses - the actual cooking process; (4) Desserts - thoughts and conclusions on what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly, what tasted good; (5) Petit Fours - footnotes and references.
Amuse-Bouche
Onion and pastry are two of those ingredients destined to be together, from Alsatian tarte a l’oignon to Zwiebelkuchen (a German onion and bacon pie). Don’t forget British cheese & onion pasties, Chinese scallion pancakes, and Pugliese calzone di cipolle along the way.
Even America has made its culinary contributions to the genre, with umm… a deep fried onion ring pie encased in a pizza dough pie crust, filled with a giant burger patty, bacon, BBQ sauce and melted cheese.
Eh, I’d probably still eat it.
Starters
Kerridge’s onion tart puts a little twist on the dish by turning it into a tarte tatin, which is traditionally, a tart of caramelised apples cooked under a lid of pastry. It’s then inverted when served so that the pastry is underneath and the fruit is on top. As usual, there’s a fun story2 about its origin!
Fundamentally, this dish makes a lot of sense because caramelising the onions is the obvious way to add richness and complexity to an onion tart. The core components of caramelisation and pastry then naturally transpose onto the idea of a tarte tatin.
In typical haute cuisine style, this recipe isn’t content with just caramelised onions, and instead, serves up onions cooked five different ways - poached baby onions, onion caramel, red onion marmalade, soubise (an old school French sauce made from onion purée and béchamel), and a vin jaune onion sauce.
I really love the ideas here. Conceptually, it’s very tight and well thought out.
Topping with a rocher of red onion marmalade creates a visual reminder of the scoop of vanilla ice cream often served with tarte tatin.
The texture of ice cream or custard is evoked with the creamy soubise, which is also a nice nod to the old school Escoffier / Larousse3 onion tarts that use soubise as the tart filling.
Lastly, having a dedicated caramel component makes it a “true” tarte tatin, at least for me.
Main Courses
Puff Pastry
Being the insufferable try-hard that I am, I naturally opted to make puff pastry from scratch, using the recipe from Calum Franklin’s ‘The Pie Room’ (an excellent cookbook that’s highly accessible, even for beginners).
Contrary to what you see on The Great British Bake Off, full puff pastry is actually not that difficult, and is relatively forgiving as long as you’re not in a rush (and not baking in a hot tent). Yes, it does take three hours, but nearly all of that time is just resting the dough in the fridge - it’s only 10-15 minutes of doing any actual work.
I had some minor breakage due to my butter layer being too cold and not fully mixed, but as you can see from the picture at the bottom, the layers still turned out beautifully.
Many, Many Onions
This was a real exhibition in onion cooking techniques. Here’s the abbreviated version:
Onion stock - This was used throughout the dish - to poach the baby onions, as a base for the vin jaune sauce, and to make the caramel. I’m sceptical it really had to be steamed; it would be easier to simmer in a saucepan like any other stock.
Poached baby onions - The recipe directions call for the hilariously specific “100 baby onions”, which like, am I actually supposed to count them out? Is there a sequel where a wealthy heiress kidnaps 101 baby onions to make a coat?
Onion caramel - Kerridge uses the dry caramel method (no water in the pan), which I also personally prefer, as it avoids the risk of crystallisation (another GBBO pitfall).
Red onion marmalade - It’s marmalade.
Soubise - A slightly weird recipe. Soubise is usually made using béchamel (the traditional way), or with cream (the modern way), which gives it body and smoothness. This soubise is just cooked down with butter, maple syrup and cider vinegar, and I ended up with a soupy sauce that needed to be rescued by slowly boiling off the excess moisture.
Vin jaune onion sauce - A special shout out goes to the vin jaune onion sauce. Firstly, I had never even heard of vin jaune before (and neither had half the wine stores I called up). Secondly, it really just reminded me of Vaga-Jeune from Emily in Paris (P.S. Brigitte Macron, if you’re reading this, I would love a retweet).
For those of you who haven’t watched Emily in Paris (you should!), Vaga-Jeune is a phamaceutical product for menopausal women from the episode where Emily learns about masculine and feminine nouns in French.
As it turns out, this vin jaune stuff is pretty rare, representing less than 5% of wine production from the Jura, which itself, is France’s smallest wine region (not to be confused with the eponymous whisky-producing island in Scotland). Ultimately, I was unable to get a locate, and used sherry as a substitute instead.
Onion Tarte Tatin
Thankfully, it was a very straightforward and painless assembly. I just wanted to show everyone the pretty layers of puff pastry that I was very proud of!
Desserts
So, was it very tasty? Yes.
Did I need to wash out the onion taste from my mouth seventeen times? Also yes.
Do I want to spend five hours looking at onions, cooking onions, and tasting onions again any time soon? Umm, not really.
Seriously, it gets very boring cooking the same ingredient over and over and over again, and having to taste it constantly to adjust for flavour and texture.
Anyway, here are my tasting notes:
The core tarte tatin was perfect. The onion caramel is a great idea that’s not found in other recipes for onion tarte tatin, and makes this unquestionably, a “true” tarte tatin. The poached onions are sweet and tender, and the red onion marmalade balances out everything with its acidity.
There was a bit too much onion. I was a little overwhelmed by the oniony-ness of the soubise and vin jaune sauce, which I felt didn’t bring enough individual character to the dish. A bit of a shame as I really liked the soubise idea.
Some salty and savoury notes would have been welcome. Cheese and onion are a classic combination for a reason, and I think it would have worked here (particularly goat’s cheese, which would bring some lightness). The dish tasted a little ambiguous as to whether it was truly a main or a dessert, and more savoury flavours would have helped to bring it home.
All in all, however, I think there’s a really great dish here, and it’s a fantastic tribute to the mighty onion.
With a few tweaks and the use of store-bought puff pastry (in fairness, Kerridge does suggest it as an alternative), this should be a quick and easy recipe, which of course, will be hitting your inboxes later this week. Until then, happy cooking!
Petit Fours (aka the footnotes)
Fergus Henderson: Legendary nose-to-tail trailblazer who seems to have trained half of my favourite chefs in London - James Lowe (Lyle’s), Justin Gellatly (Bread Ahead), Tom Pemberton (Hereford Road), Jon Rotherham and Tom Harris (The Marksman), Anna Hansen (Modern Pantry), Tim Siadatan (Trullo, Padella). I’m definitely missing many more names.
Tarte tatin gets its name from the Tatin sisters, Stéphanie and Caroline, who owned and ran the Hotel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron in the late 19th and early 20th century. Legend has is that Stéphanie was making an apple pie one day, smelled the caramelising apples, and realised she had forgotten to place the pie base in the pan. Trying to rescue the dish, she put the pastry on the top, cooked the pan in the oven, and turned the pie upside down, et voilà, tarte tatin was born!
Cute story. But most likely embellished, as upside down gâteaux renversés, and tarte solognote (from the Sologne region surrounding Lamotte-Beuvron) date back as early as the 1840s. There are entire websites and even a book(!) devoted to the origin of this famous dessert.
Another origin story is that Stéphanie dropped an apple tart on the floor, reassembled it upside down, stuck it in the oven, and served it. Which is a little gross. And also makes Massimo Bottura’s ‘Oops, I Dropped the Lemon Tart’ somewhat derivative.
Larousse, which I’ve mentioned many times on here, is the definitive encyclopedia of French cuisine, and my go to reference book. Highly recommend, and also a great gift idea for the enthusiastic cook.
Escoffier’s ‘Le Guide Culinaire’ is a classic culinary textbook, first published in 1903, that modernised and codified many French cooking techniques, and was a key building block in modern haute cuisine.
This is so fun to read honestly
Hi, this was very fun to read. What are the tweaks you recommend?