Tarte Tatin

The Tatin sisters (Caroline and Stéphanie) ran the Hôtel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron, Loire Valley, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The story of the upside-down tart's invention varies — the most cited version describes a tart that began to burn and was rescued by covering it with pastry and inverting — but whatever its origin, Maxim's restaurant in Paris adopted and popularised the preparation in the early 20th century, and it has since become one of the most recognised of all classical French desserts.

A tart baked upside down — the apples and their caramel on the bottom of the pan during baking, the pastry on top — then inverted to reveal a deep, amber-lacquered surface of caramelised apple arranged over a flaky pastry base that has absorbed the caramel from below. Tarte tatin is simultaneously one of the most forgiving and most demanding preparations in the classical French pastry repertoire: forgiving because the inversion hides imperfection; demanding because the caramel, the apple cookdown, and the pastry must each reach their correct stage simultaneously. The timing of the inversion is the entire technique.

Tarte tatin is a study in caramelisation depth. The apple's fructose — the dominant sugar in apples — caramelises at a lower temperature than sucrose (the added sugar) and produces different aromatic compounds. The combination of sucrose caramelisation (from the added sugar) and fructose caramelisation (from the apple's own sugars) produces a complexity greater than either alone. As Segnit notes, caramel and apple is a pairing of chemical kinship: the Maillard products of the caramelised sugar and the terpenoid aromatic compounds of the baked apple share a mutual amplification in the same aromatic family. Crème fraîche's lactic acid resolves the bitter pyrolysis compounds at the back of the palate that the caramelisation depth inevitably produces.