October 8th, 2000

The Philadelphia Inquirer
Written by Greg LaBan, Inquirer Food Editor

It's early fall, time for the annual making of Tarte Tatin,
an almost-mystical union of pie crust, caramel and apple.

My family knows it’s fall when I begin lining our stovetop with aluminum foil. The glint and crinkle of these carefully placed sheets are a sure sign that I am preparing for Tarte Tatin. Not only is the classic French upside-down apple tart my autumnal ode to fruit, it is also my yearly tribute to the joy of messy cooking.

Puffs of flour hover about me as I prepare the sugar-dough curst, and try to rekindle the magic of my rusty rolling pin moves. The acrid smell of vinegar and rock salt fills the air as I lovingly polish (also once a year) the copper exterior of my beloved Tarte Tatin pan.  Its heavy body lined with painted with stainless steel - essentially a skillet without a handle - is ideal for my trip from stove to oven and the tricky finale of the upside-down flip.

And the foil is carefully laid, a modest but effective precaution for the caramel that will flow, the result of improbable quantities of sugar and butter that will bubble up between the apples packed into a tight spiral. It is inevitable that this golden amber juice will spill out onto the stovetop before it concentrates, darkens and reduces into the fruit.

Personally, I am more tense about the color of my caramel than the mess it makes.  Will it be too pale?  Will it be too wet?  Or worse, will it burn?  Will the apples stick?  You neer know until the whole thing is baked, cautiously flipped onto a plate, and the pan slowly lifted from the fruit....

The suspense.  That awful but thrilling risk of failure.  These are a very real part of my annual event.  But when all goes even moderately well, it is a mess worth making because Tarte Tatin has a way of distilling apples to their essence and preserving it in caramel amber.

The key, then, is to find apples worthy of the effort.

For this, I turned to Ike and Lisa Kerschner at North Star Orchard. I came to know their exceptional apples through tastings at the farmers markets in Philadelphia - at 17th and South Streets on Wednesday, Clark Park in West Philadelphia on Friday, and Headhouse Square on Saturday.   But it was not until I visited the Kerschners’ Chester County orchard recently for an open house (the orchard is not normally open to the public) that I truly understood what a tree-ripened apple could be.

Don’t mention the word “Delicious” around there. Others on our tour cried “Mushy” and “No” at the mere invocation of those classic supermarket apples.

North Star grows purely boutique fruit, and, as we strolled up and down the steeply sloping hills of their orchard, plucking perfectly ripe apples representing only a fraction of their 60 or so varieties right off the branches, my mouth filled with the intensely brisk crunch and subtle flavors of many apples I’d never heard of.

There were the softball-sized Eclipse, almost as dark as a plum, with a sharp tartness and the tannin of thick skins. Aromatic, matted-skin russets, some of the first apples known to the Massachusetts colonies, had a strangely dry but flavorful flesh that is perfect, Ike said, for wine and cheese. The Scarlett O’Hara gave a soft honeyed flavor like that of a ripe pear. And Sugarsnaps followed a sharp burst of tart with a swell of sugar that lingered. A giant red Royalty was among my favorites for straight-ahead eating.

But what of pie apples, Ike? What about my Tarte Tatin?

Ask the bearded Ike an apple question and you’re likely to receive an impressive horticultural discourse on everything from breeding programs and genetic lineage to climatologic and the mellowing benefits of shelf time in a humid cellar.

Sure enough, when it come to cooking apples, Ike has methodically tested them to determine which among his apple bounty is best suited to the heat, which keeps its shape and doesn’t shrink, and which has enough tartness to emerge from a caramel-soaked oven bath and still taste like an apple.

The Gold Rush is his first choice, an intensely yellow fruit that seems to taste even better cooked than raw.  Unfortunately, Gold Rush doesn't ripen until mid-October, a little late for my early-fall enthusiasm.  So I turn to the next best specimen, the Liberty, an impressively green and red striped apple descended from the Macoun and an unnamed parent from New York known only as PR154-12.

It seemed to have that balance of sweet, tart and dense flesh that I sought. And the size was just right, a medium, perfectly round fruit that allowed me to create two tight spirals of halved apples inside my pan.

I turn the flame on medium-high and carefully stack the halves as the bed of sugar and butter beneath them quickly melts, melds, and bubbles into sticky brown juice, filling my kitchen with the smell of fall, spilling over onto my stovetop as I spin each apple onto its uncooked side. Then, once the second side is browned and the caramel begins to subside, I extinguish the flame and begin rolling the dough.

It is not my best.  A little dry, a little cracked.  But Tarte Tatin is forgiving of imperfectly rolled crust (another reason why I like it) because, when it is finished baking, the golden brown crust is only a rustic pedestal for the fruit.

What I want to know is how it looks. I place a dish atop the finished crust, carefully grasp both ends of this pan-plate sandwich with a pair of hot mitts and flip.

Using a two-pronged fork, I gently lift the pan and am buffeted by the billows of apple steam. My heart skips a beat, until the mist clears.

The pan is clean. The apples have unfolded, a perfect dark brown spiral of one hemisphere caramelized into the next.

I cut a slice and take a bite.  The crust is not so bad, crumbly and sweet, still soaking up the juices.  But it is the Liberty apples I am savoring. They held their shape, but are soft and airy, almost quivering like an applesauce souffle from the heat.  An intensely focused edge of tartness emerges through their buttery caramel glaze, and it evokes in me the image of the orchard I had visited only a day before.  The wooden crates full of wet apples that I picked through for this pie.

Oh yes, there is that caramel mess to clean.  But thank heavens for the foil - it can wait.  First, there is fresh Tarte Tatin to behold and eat.

The French upside-down apple confection known as Tarte Tatin was named for two sisters named Tatin who popularized the dessert at their hotel-restaurant in the Loire Valley at the beginning of the 1900s.  The dessert later became a specialty of Maxim's, where it was first served in Paris.

The dish traditionally uses a specially designed handleless copper pan with slightly sloping sides and a stainless steel lining that is ideal for the even cooking of caramel and the upside-down flip involved.  You can substitute a 10-inch skillet, however, as long as it is heavy enough to handle the caramelizing process and is oven-safe.

The recipe works better making enough dough for two crusts.  You can freeze the unused dough for up to two months.

North Star Orchard • Ike & Lisa Kerschner
Email: Lisa@northstarorchard.com
3226 Limestone Rd. • Cochranville, PA 19330
© Copyright 2008 • North Star Orchard